I've been playing Darwinia pretty much since it came out, about 7 or 8 years ago... IIRC I have played one of the last betas as well.

I can only warmly recommend it, as well as pretty much all of the other games of the developer - Introversion: Uplink, DEFCON, Multiwinia. They are all very innovative and different.

BTW, you can often find all of these games in indie packs, or even in Introversion packs, very cheap.

Much as I'd like to try it, I'm a little on the fence. Strategy games generally aren't my cup of tea as they make me feel too removed from the events of the game and controlling groups of units has always felt unintuitive to me. If someone can sell me on it while it is on sale, great, but I'm skeptical.

I tend not to buy any game I already own unless it's on sale, and unfortunately missed this one. It's very much of the command and conquer genre, and I concede it's AI is not difficult compared to something like "Starcraft".

That said - it's fun, gorgeous, has a neat internal storyline, and if you're a "Tron" afficianado it has a style nothing else compares too.

Jonnan

I purchased Darwinia during one of the sales events. It's one of the more offbeat games I played in a while, although some design choices that force micromanagement more than I would like.

This game should be avoided for spiritual reasons.

I don't think it's a huge design flaw to have to keep your Darwinians in safe spot when attacking spiders. It does lead to a lot of micromanagement, but combat in this game is generally high in micro management, at least against the bigger enemies. If anything was wrong with the game balance it was too easy.