You know the term “it’s like herding cats”? Well, herding cats has never been more fun than it is in Darwinia+ on XBL Arcade. It’s a great balance of RTS, puzzle game, and God sim. But I was surprised it ended up being a full title in my library.

Looks old, plays new

I”m a sucker for retro-style games, and Darwinia+ is what a Tron RTS might look like if there was one. It’s all very 80s 3D with grid lines and shaded polygons. It may look lame at first considering today’s graphic abilities, but when you consider Darwinia+ displays entire environments at once within this style, it’s almost impressive. While the retro look suckered me in, the gameplay kept me playing and playing. As always, I tried the demo first and it kept me coming back. I figure any demo that come back and play more than once is a game that’s worth owning. Right now Darwinia+ is $15 and what you get for that price is almost two games in one.

The basic single-player campaign follows the story of this digital world where there are little green digital people, called Darwinians. Their digital world is under attack my computer viruses and you need to help them rid the world of the bad guys. It’s a pretty straight forward goal but one that isn’t always easy to achieve. You see, you can’t really control the Darwinians. All you can do is direct them by selecting one guy and making him the traffic cop, then all other Darwinians will follow his direction.

What ends up happening is a chain of way points that lead your people from one place to another. This would be easy if the nasty virus guys weren’t in your way. In order to deal with them you get a small arsenal of controllable characters. Your main tool will be a pack of soldier guys that you move in dual-stick manner, left stick moves while right stick shoots, a control scheme I really enjoy. Along with your soldiers are engineers that not only “reprogram” enemy outposts, but also collect digital souls.

Digital cats come from digital souls

Every time a characters dies - yours or theirs - it leaves a little orb. These orbs are collected by engineers and returned to your home base to create new Darwinians. Most of the time the only thing your Darwinians need to do is survive, which means they hang out a lot just wandering around while you run around and blow things up. But you will need Darwinians to operate outposts and contraptions throughout the game, so it’s important you have enough of the little green guys to accomplish your goal. You need to collect the soul orbs or you’ll have a tough time…because those gun turrets can’t shoot themselves!

The campaign mostly involves you walking around blowing stuff up, which is entirely satisfying, but you can’t forget that you’re trying to solve a problem. Sometimes this gets lost and isn’t too obvious, but thankfully you can get a list of objectives from the menu at anytime. You can also leave any map at anytime to try another and it will save the state of each map. You’ll also be able to research upgrades for your Darwinians and other characters.

The other part of Darwinia+ is the skirmish mode, which comes in both single-player and multiplayer flavors. Skirmishes are less puzzle and more straight up RTS. In skirmishes you’re in direct control of the little Darwinians…lots of them. There are several skirmish modes - like king of the kill and domination - so your goals will vary, but for the most part you have to herd your Darwinians to go head-to-head against the other army. Just the sheer numbers involved in a skirmish makes it quite a spectacle, it’s easy to get lost in your battles.

Just let them fight it out

There are also power-ups in skirmishes that unlock bonuses like gun turrets, air strikes, and even meteor showers. The computer AI will give you a good challenge, even on the easy setting, but playing on XBL with another human is a ton of fun too. There are quite a few skirmish maps too that support up to four players at once. Honestly, a two player game is hectic enough, I can’t imagine trying to manage four battle fronts with these little guys.

While the look of Darwinia+ may leave something to be desired for some, one place where it does a great job is controls. In both campaign and skirmish mode, the button scheme to select players/armies is great. In skirmish mode, all you need to do is press A and a select circle grows, allowing you to select a huge area or a small area. Most controllable characters have two modes of movement too, you can either control them or just direct them to go to a destination point. This makes is really easy to send a ship or engineer great distances while you can control your soldiers more closely.

For all the fun that Darwinia+ is, there are two places where the game just drops the ball. Sound and camera. The sound is just awful. Not the music, which is happy chiptunes, but the sound effects. Killing a bad guy sounds like someone put the Lawnmower Man down a garage disposal. A lot of it just ends up sounding like static. The camera is also a problem as you progress in the game. As more mountains and land masses come into the play, the more often you’ll find the camera swirling around or just becoming downright unplayable. You’ll also find some clipping problems and AI hiccups, but nothing there that isn’t unforgivable.

A balanced game for a balanced price

Darwinia+ is definitely a play-before-you-buy game, but for $15 you’ll get a lot of gameplay and a lot of fun. Along with hours of gameplay you’ll get a fun avatar shirt too, which is something more games need to do. If you’re looking for a light RTS with a dash of puzzle and just enough micromanaging to keep you happy without distracting you, then Darwinia+ will deliver. And when you make it on-line, let me know so my little stick men can come slaughter your stick men.