A seriously imaginative, downright visionary realization of post-neo retro gaming, “Darwinia” is both completely familiar and yet like nothing you’ve played before. Actually, it’s like many games you’ve played before, but never all at once, and never looking quite this cool.
Part real-time strategy, part “Centipede”-generation twitch action, part virtual sleuth adventure, part “Lemmings”-like micro-managerial sim, part, uh, Etch-a-Sketch, it’s a weird, multi-hybrid that needs a new genre definition.
“Darwinia” is coyly dressed in stark simplicity, with a look, sound and general ambiance reminiscent of the hallowed Hollywood watershed “Tron” – except with little digital stickmen and defiantly homely pixels and sprites that come off as elegant in their simpatico world of topographical grid landscapes laced with pseudo vector beams.
It’s a 3D world full of 2D characters, a “virtual theme park” inhabited by apparently sentient little programs called Darwinians, currently plagued by a malicious virus. Sucked into this world and guided by Darwinia’s programmer from the outside, you must manage the situation, muster squads through a menu overlay and hand-drawing of gesture-symbols that serve as commands.
You also actively participate in virus violence, manually aiming for your ’80s flavored avatars bleeping, blipping and blooping their way through 8-bit viral evisceration.
While it takes only a little while to get a handle on novel/familiar game play, mission complexity ramps up along the way, with singular missions easily eating up an hour or so. But you’ll never notice, because it’s all so enthralling. (It’s sold in North America via download only at darwinia.co.uk.)
Introversion Software; PC; $29.99. Rating: Age 7+ (Everyone)
A game that scores a few merit points for ambitiousness and then little else, “Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance” tries to be a role-playing game (RPG) for free-roaming 3D fight-game fans.
You play out a cliché story of mob-wannabe characters wandering around a nondescript ghetto, picking up gratuitously violent gang members, chatting with potty-mouthed denizens who may or may not offer up some useful tidbit of information about the point of it all, managing your attributes and changing your clothes way too often to free-roam incognito.
But mostly you’re just fighting, which is the better part of the game (sometimes you can just beat the living pride out of someone, rather than the living daylights, so they’ll do your bidding or give you money or more info). Even then, it’s unexceptional.
Capcom; PlayStation 2, Xbox; $49.99. Rating: Mature (17+) (blood, strong language, violence)
Shaun Conlin is a freelance games reviewer for Cox News Service. E-mail him at shaunconlin@evergeek.com.
