I've been into games for as long as I can remember, maybe even longer (who knows). I have seen the rise of games from a minor and relatively geeky pastime to a massive entertainment industry where a game from late last year had the biggest opening weekend of any piece of entertainment ever (film, music etc. included). To go with that, development teams have grown from one or two blokes in their bedrooms coding a game inside 3 months up to teams of 100+ dedicated developers, specialising across the fields of art, script writing, music, graphics, physics, A.I. and more. Now, while the development team of Darwinia, Introversion, is not two blokes in a bedroom (it's four blokes, although I reckon they work in an office), it does show that there is still room for smaller developers to compete with the big guns. I'm not going to go any easier on it because of that though...

Darwinia itself is a polygonal landscape, dotted with occasional wire frame trees that look like they were created by a fractal algorithm. The Darwinians themselves are little green (non-articulated) stick men, and the virus comes in a number of flavours. The basic virus is a short snake of 2D triangles that moves across the landscape randomly, although usually stays in groups. The rest of the manifestations of the virus are 3D creatures of various types. All of them are capable of killing the helpless Darwinians and also the computer programs that you summon onto the landscape to help fight back against the virus.

The game mostly consists of you moving your squad around, blasting the virus, creating safe passage for your engineers to reclaim buildings for your use, and thus a safe place for your Darwinians. Later in the game you get to use the Darwinians as an offensive force though, initially as a mini army with their own lasers, and then later to arm laser turrets to drive back the virus. It's simple stuff – you never have to juggle a vast number of units at once, and the action is never frantic – you just mow down the virus, and move on – and this is going to cause you to find the game either quite compelling or quite monotonous. It's a problem throughout the game – having to create programs by drawing the correct shape is an amusing idea at first, but the novelty may wear off. At other times you have to guide your units around very carefully – your squad will get stuck if you direct it to a point that would cause them to cross water as the crow flies.

Darwinia took me around 25 hours to complete, not too bad for a modern game. I'm sure they could have easily put in more maps if they had wanted, but to be honest it would have stretched the concept a little thin – the game managed to pull out enough tricks in the 25 hours to keep it interesting, but it did come a little close to feeling like a grind at times though. I guess that feeling comes from the fact that there are certain things in the game that could have been done better, and a large part of the game play was borrowed from Sensible Software's Cannon Fodder (there's a nod to that in one of the numerous loading sequences). It is a unique game though, and certainly worth downloading the demo to see whether it can cast its spell on you.