Multiwinia review

Ambrosia has published some of the Mac's best-loved games, so a new release is always something of an occasion.

Then again, Multiwinia isn't exactly a Mac game, being a port of a Windows title by Introversion Software, and it isn't exactly new either, in that it's set in the virtual world that was introduced in Darwinia. This time, instead of working your way through a single-player challenge to save the tiny Darwinians from extinction, you lead one tribe into battle against up to three others.

Though we tested Multiwinia on the first day of its official release, there was already a healthy community of opponents online. In fact, with no local network option available, we had to password protect our games to avoid gatecrashers. Unlike with some Internet-only titles, there were no problems playing between Macs behind the same router. Windows users can also join in, and when you're feeling antisocial, you can play against the computer. If you use the Mac OS X Firewall, you'll need to add Multiwinia manually to its list and set Allow Incoming Connections before hosting an online game; you don't get the usual Mac OS X alert offering to do this for you.

The environment is a mix of 1980s big-pixel retro and 21st century 3D. Multiwinians scurry about like low-res ants, spewing forth from spawn points and clambering over the landscape. Flying your camera with an intuitive combination of mouse and keys, you can swoop from a god's-eye overview into the thick of the action, the noise of battle rising as you fall. It's easy to forget you're supposed to be telling the little critters what to do.

This may look like one of those real-time strategy games that take months to master, but instead of complex missions, you get the simple objectives you'd expect in a first-person shooter: capture something, protect your base or hold a position. Starting and finishing a game within a coffee break is a definite possibility.

In case moving troops about gets too dry, you're provided with useful accessories, more of which fall from the sky in crates. Having placed a gun turret, for example, you can climb into it and let fly at the opposing hordes in a first-person stylee. The rather vague controls made this less rewarding than it should have been, but it's still quite a lot of fun.

Having grown accustomed to well-behaved Mac OS X apps, we were disconcerted that Multiwinia took over the screen and refused to cede to Alt-Tab. Fortunately, buried in the options is the facility to run the app in a window, if you're not too distracted by work looming in your peripheral vision.

Combining the most immediately satisfying elements of almost every gaming genre except Dance Dance Revolution, Multiwinia is calculated to appeal to fans of anything from Lemmings to Quake Arena. There aren't many ways to cram so much entertainment into so few minutes, with a social element to boot and barely any temptation to get sucked in and lose the whole afternoon.

It's just a shame that not everyone can play: the system requirements are much higher than for Darwinia, and ruled out a couple of our more venerable war horses.