Darwinia

Darwinia is a nice little RTS which reminded me a lot of the movie TRON. It is not an overly long game, and you could probably beat it in around 10 hours, less if you try to get through as speedily as possible. The writing is decent. The gameplay is decent. The soundtrack is okay. It should be noted that the game is single-player only, unlike most well-known RTS games. You can tell that a lot of care went into this game. It runs well, did not have any noticeable bugs, and also includes some nice extras like a map editor. I really appreciated the work that went into the game's startup screens, which are all very nice and fun to watch. Some of them even reveal background information about the game's story. The number of different startup screens really surprised me. I finished the game over many sessions, and I had already finished just over half the game before I saw a startup screen repeated. It is certainly unusual to see so much effort put into something that most people would probably consider an extremely minor part of a game these days. I have no more to say on the graphics, writing, soundtrack, etc. They are nothing too remarkable, but they are all decent. The gameplay is where my main concern is. Darwinia's gameplay is, honestly, pretty slow-paced. There were a lot of times when I was waiting for my units to get from one place to another. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that this game has the lowest unit cap I have ever seen in an RTS, three units! This is upgradable to five. That's it. Sure, the Darwinians don't count towards that cap, but they are not very useful except for manning fortifications and objectives, which they are required for. The upshot is that building units other than Darwinians is instant and takes no resources, so if you lose a unit you can instantly reconstitute it at the nearest spawn point. Another complaint I have is that the tutorial does not seem complete. Sure, you get walked through a few things, but some very important basic mechanics are omitted from the tutorial. In particular, the transmission dishes which serve as bridges between parts of levels were not explained to me by the game, and I ended up only finding out about them when they were mentioned by another player. This is a central mechanic that exists on every map and is essential for the later missions! I am not sure why something so critical is not in the tutorial, especially considering that there is such a bridge in the tutorial level, though using it is not required to finish that level or the other early levels. This would not be quite so bad were it not for the fact that this mechanic is non-obvious, as the transmission dishes appear to be part of the level as opposed to something you can control. There are some other, less critical omissions as well, like how to switch a squad's weapons. The game does have a well-executed Linux port, which I very much appreciate. The game runs natively on Linux, and it runs well. It is refreshing to see a native Linux port which works just fine and has no issues that I noticed. If you like single-player RTS and computer-themed stuff, this is a good pick.

A simple, fun and very basic game. Not for everyone. Super old school feel but I liked it.

Un clásico, no entiendo como no lo tenía ya puntuado.

Took the game about 10 minutes to win me over, if you enjoyed creeper world this is right up your alley. Charming and worth twice what their asking for

I love this game. Bought it in 2015 and still play through this once a year. Easy to play, doesn't take long to master. Great Tron-ish graphics and butter smooth performance. Good music, cute retroloading- and demo scene intros. Kind of wish someone made a Cannon Fodder total conversion mod for this ;) (It's 2025, and I still play it once a year.)

this game is amazing. its not very complicated which i enjoy, the art style is interesting and simplistic, absolutly worth buying for a 20 year old game.

Other than some small pathfinding issues this game is a work of Art. Someone will dig this out of an archive one day in the future and it will blow them away.

i love this game so much. hidden gem. must play

The slow game and the purity of the Darwinians is great for recovering from stress.

You don't need 1 hour to tell this game is a masterpiece. From the nonexistent pathfinding to the NPC Darwinians, Darwinia is a game where you have to do things yourself. That's the reason for 200 of these bad reviews. I have to say, this is probably the most underrated game of all time. It's legitimately a masterpiece, especially in 2022 after the full remaster. I am never disappointed by an Introversion game :) Please, don't listen to the bad reviews, and at least try the game in the demo before not buying it.