Darwinia [Retail Box] [PC]

• Official Site: www.savedarwinia.com

From the tiny independent studio behind 2001's excellent hacker-sim Uplink, Darwinia proves you don't need big budgets and huge teams to make outstanding games. Part action, part strategy, part puzzle, part... just plain odd, it isn't a game that lends itself to concise explanations, but certainly lends itself to high praise. Innovative and full of charm and creative energy, it's a title that no serious gamer should miss.

The back-story goes like this: There's a computer system where a middle-aged, balding guy with glasses named Sepulveda was conducting some kind of experiment into artificial life. He created a race of creatures called Darwinians, which look like little green stick figures that inhabit a Tron-like virtual world inside the computer. Sepulveda's idyllic world didn't last long, however. Attacked by a voracious virus, the Darwinians are in danger of total extermination; and yes, it's your job to save them.

You don't control the Darwinians themselves, but you can encourage them from place to place. They can control certain machinery scattered around some maps, and with the right research can also defend themselves with weapons and man gun emplacements. Mostly, though, they just mill around enjoying the scenery.

So what do you control? Programs you create and place on the landscape. At the start of the game you just have two programs, a squad of laser-armed soldiers, perfect for taking on the virus threat, and an engineer, which is defenseless but can perform tasks like taking over buildings and collecting the souls of fallen programs for recycling. Soon you'll graduate to better-armed soldiers, more capable engineers, and entirely new programs.

At the start of the game, you can only control three of these programs at once, but with research you can expand this to four or five. Even then, it's never enough. Maximizing the efficiency of your virus-cleaning operations depends on carefully prioritizing tasks, and much of the strategy in Darwinia stems from the limits on units and their positioning.

Did we say limits? In other ways, this system is very free. Because there are no resources, you're able to create and destroy programs in a totally arbitrary way. It's often desirable to blow away and recreate an engineer for no better reason than you want it to be somewhere else, and throwing squad after squad of troops into an overwhelming army of virus-ridden nasties costs you nothing but your time. As long as you manage to take one or two of them with you, you're making progress.

All this action is set against a backdrop of the various lands and machines that make up the Darwinians' life cycle. Any creature that's killed leaves its soul behind; these can be immediately gathered up by an engineer and recycled into a new Darwinian, or will eventually float upwards to a vast red mass of life energy, from which they'll eventually be reborn. There's an almost religious reverence in the way the game approaches and explains the world's workings.