Multiwinia Review (PC)

Our all-time favourite RTS is Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 because it finds the perfect balance of complexity and simplicity. The tech trees aren’t too deep, and you don’t get bogged down in confusing statistics and micro management. You build your units and try to wipe out the other player as quickly as possible. The fun lies in trying to outsmart your opponent despite both of you knowing every single trick from the small repertoire available. Multiwinia takes this approach to real time strategy and strips it down even further, making every game a bare-bones battle of quick thinking and sneaky tricks. It’s great.

Speaking of bare-bones, there’s no sidebar obstructing your view of the action, every order is input with a click of the right or left mouse buttons and the camera is operated with the WASD keys. That’s pretty much it. Space bar will deselect anything you currently have highlighted and holding Shift will let you scroll across the map quicker, but there’s never any need to fumble anywhere else on the keyboard.

It's really rather nice when it's moving on your screen. Honest.

Controlling your Darwinians couldn’t be simpler. You left click on a chap to select him, and right click on the target to send him on his way. Right clicking on a character will promote him to officer status. These guys can control small squads of Darwinians which can be placed in formations, providing a much more powerful attack and at longer ranges, but they are slow moving and vulnerable from behind. The officers can also be placed in strategic places such as outside a spawn point and used to direct fresh soldiers in whichever direction you choose. Power-ups fall from the sky in crates much like in Worms, providing your army with advantages such as shields or speed or even rocket launchers – that you can actually get inside and control from a first person view – to wreak some serious havoc with, among other things. The power-ups can swing a battle pretty rapidly, so it’s a good idea to get as many men to the fallen crates as quickly as possible (the more men you send to a crate, the quicker you crack them open). Vehicles are also available, and can transport groups of your little fellas across rough terrain and water quickly.

Argh!

There are six game modes available including Domination, which basically pits you against other Darwinian armies in a battle to the death. If you can’t wipe each other out by the time the clock runs down, the winner has the most spawn points under their control. Capture the Statue is probably the most imaginative of the six modes, and our favourite, where players must carry huge statues back to their own base in order to win. If you’re pretty good at securing statues close to your base, you can hot foot over to your enemy’s nearest statue and steal that as well, making for an exciting game of tug-of-war. King of the Hill and Blitzkrieg are very similar in that you have to defend positions in order to win, Rocket Riot is all about fuelling up your space rocket by controlling solar panels across the map. The first side to fully fuel their rocket and lift off wins. Assault is essentially attack and defend with each team either defending a base containing a weapon of mass destruction, or assaulting the base to disarm the WMD. Every game mode deserves to be in here, and we certainly had plenty of fun with all of them.

Multiwinia is intuitive, clutter free and easy to pick up and play for five minutes at a time, but beware; five minutes will soon be an hour or more. Which is perhaps the most impressive thing about Multiwinia; that such a seemingly simple game can draw you in, gradually revealing layers and layers of subtle complexities that can give you the edge over an opponent. To use a tired expression – it’s easy to play but difficult to master.

Runs without a hitch on our piece of shit computer, too.

We can’t pick many faults with Multiwinia, but we do fear that fans of more complex RTS titles will be put off by its overly simple approach, but we suggest those people give it a chance with a match against a friend they are particularly competitive with. It’s also a shame that the 50 single player scenarios are over fairly quickly, but this would be an unfair criticism because we didn’t really buy Multiwinia to play on our own. Battling online with a player at a similar skill level easily matches any of the best RTS experiences we’ve ever had, and you can’t really ask for more than that. When it comes bundled with Darwinia on the Xbox 360 – providing the controls hold up well on a joypad – we’ll almost certainly have an essential purchase on our hands.

Rating: (Scoring policy)

By Jonny Robson

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Tags: Introversion, Multiwinia

1 Comment to Multiwinia Review (PC)

1. [...] this week we’ve reviewed the great Multiwinia, WipEout HD, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and Vigilante 8 Arcade. We also belatedly looked at Super [...]
Weekly Roundup | Snappy Gamer on November 8th, 2008

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