nixsight

Not reading as much as I am writing at the moment, but I did take time out to play a couple of games.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

Darwinia

Five things about Darwinia:

Like “Uplink” before it, which was also by tiny outfit Introversion, the game is plotted and designed to feel completely authentic to a PC gaming experience – that is, the interfaces and mythos of the game is supposed to be taking place within your computer, so you’re fully immersed.

A beautifully designed game that does wonders with it’s simplistic visual style.

Stripped down and basic resource management, research models and consistently smart gameplay make picking the game up deceptively easy, but allow for endlessly variable ways of playing, and despite the lack of realism to the world of the game, gives the truest “God game” experience available in ages.

For all of these reasons, and it’s relatively short campaign length, I played it from start to finish, almost solidly over a week.

World Of Goo

A decent sized free demo of this is available at Valve’s Steam, but you can find more out about it here. Here are five things about it:

What might have passed for an ambitious and nicely put together online Flash game is elevated by slick presentation, beautiful visual design, and a world-beating physics engine.

Like Darwinia, simple but robust game mechanics allow for every player to play it differently, as many ways as they like.

A perfectly realised cartoon world, reminiscent of Jhonen Vasquez’s work, give this 2d game an extra dimension – of awesome! Or at least, of great, unique character.

The death-traps and puzzle-solving appeal utterly to any number of the hardcore gamer’s OCDs, and reward abstract skill and a fuzzy approach to solution building, as well as more traditional or methodical gaming strengths.

Basically a very smart physics engine given life through cool and simple character animation and nice gameplay flair, which put together will make for endless fun, and probably means that the second I have a few spare pennies, I will be buying the whole – cheap – game!

Left 4 Dead

Another free-demo download from Steam, this one, only just out. Five things about it:

This should be an easy sell, being a zombie survival-horror game developed by the team who brought us Half Life 2, and based on the same engine.

It doesn’t flinch on the hyperviolence and intensity, with the remit to bring the player as close to the feeling of being stuck in a modern zombie horror movie as possible.

Cosmetically beautiful – great looking and atmospheric lcoations, with cool voice acting, and genuinely scary zombie designs and action, and an intuitive control system.

In the single-player campaign missions really smart team AI make for a nicely immersive experience, though you get a strong feeling that they make it too easy, with their perfect aim and lack of confusion, and the game will really come into it’s own in co-operative play.

However, and this may just be because it’s a demo, the fluidity of your character’s movements around the locations feels a little flat in places – more Doom 3 than Half Life 2, and the pacing of the calm moments to intense and frenzied zombie attacks – in which it’s sometimes difficult to see what is going on, though again that’s probably part of the fun in multiplayer – makes for an experience that at this point is a little two-note. Though perhaps the full-game allows for a more developed sense of place, and more nuanced gaming.