Kill counts range in the thousands as attacking forces throw their unending numbers against the defenders in an attempt to reach and destroy a WMD before the defenders can activate it. Assault pits large waves of attackers against well-entrenched defenders with walls, turrets and chokepoints but few reinforcements. The action constantly shifts back and forth as factions shuffle forces to and from panel farms, struggling to prepare the craft for liftoff. In Rocket Riot, players fight to man solar panels in a race to fuel their team’s giant rocket. The most unique game modes, and the ones most suited to Multiwinia‘s inimitable style, are Rocket Riot and Assault. Capture the Statue spawns a statue at a common location, which Multiwinians must fight to secure and drag back to a capture zone.
Blitzkrieg is a variation on the control-point style of the Battlefield series where Multiwinians jockey for position to capture point zones all over the map. Domination has players scrambling to control as many spawn points as possible, while King of the Hill pits tribes against each other to hold down a central territory. Most of Multiwinia‘s game types center around spawn points, structures that, when manned by Multiwinians, periodically cough up groups of soldiers for you to organize and send into the meat grinder. The randomizer helps impart Multiwinia with a hectic, unpredictable pace that belies the game’s otherwise simplistic mechanics. Some crates even trigger “crate mania,” which spawn dozens of crates everywhere. The aptly-named Randomizer takes this element of chance even further by occasionally introducing crates with a temporary global effect, such as a “mega rage” that increases the damage output of all units or a “spawn mania” that briefly quintuples the output of every working spawn point. Crates on occasion also contain immediate benefits, like rockets or an instant batch of reinforcements. Ant colonies spawn tiny monsters that scatter formations and hamper movement, and harvester units gather up dead souls and deliver them to the nearest spawn point for resurrection. Rage temporarily triples the firing rate and damage of a selected group of soldiers (easily a tide-turner in a pitched battle), while gun turrets deny territory to the enemy. Crates contain a variety of special attacks or units. The main wild cards in a typical Multiwinia match are the periodic crate drops, which are scattered randomly across the battlefield.
Other than Multiwinia‘s use of formations and officers, there is no unit differentiation, alternative weaponry or upgrade system of any sort.
Ranked Multiwinians have greater range and are more effective at rushing turrets, but they’re also more vulnerable to area attacks such as grenades. You can also use officers to organize groups of Multiwinians into rudimentary ranks not unlike the musket brigades of colonial-era armies.
Placing officers near spawn points helps muster the reinforcements critical to forming suitably overwhelming mobs. Officers direct nearby Multiwinians to these designated locations. Right-clicking a Multiwinian promotes it, essentially converting it from citizen into waypoint. The Multiwinians as they are now called have separated into different colored tribes and set about ethnically cleansing their rivals in an unending war.Īs in Darwinia, Multiwinia‘s gameplay revolves around the use of “officer” units. Where Darwinia has players rescuing tiny sentient programs – the titular Darwinians – from a marauding computer virus in an environment not unlike that of Tron, Multiwinia depicts the next unfortunate step in the Darwinians’ evolution – war. Its multiplayer adaptation Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest is similarly modest, yet provides as idiosyncratic a real-time strategy experience as its big brother. Developed by Introversion Software, the original Darwinia impressed upon the gaming world the idea that a game could look great and deliver unique gameplay without requiring a million-dollar production budget – Darwinia took up less space than a music file in some higher-profile titles.