All this rampant consumerism has made it rather hard for me to focus on any one particular game long enough to finish it. The 40+ hours of anime demanding to be watched has also proved a bit of distraction. In spite of these hardships I have managed to finish one:
Of all the indie games I bought, Eufloria is the most indie. It doesn't even a name in the developer section.
The gameplay consists of simplistic real time strategy. You command seedlings which explore meteors, fight enemy seedlings , and grow trees. The trees either produce more seedlings or are used to defend the local meteor. When you attack opposing meteors your seedling destroy a tree so they can burrow into the core and assimilate the meteor to your command.
And the above paragraph explains about 50% of Eufloria's gameplay.
This simplicity makes the game very accessible, but also means that it is very easy. Almost every level is simply beat by growing the largest seedling swarm and steamrolling over any competition. The few times there's any other sort of objective, you still just build up a huge force because it's all you can really do.
I mentioned in a past post that there is a game on Kongregate that is similar. It is called Phage Wars and it manages to be even more simple than Eufloria but alot more challenging. PW's has cells instead of meteors and....little squishy things instead of seedling. Cells generate more LSTs and when you attack or move LSTs at half of the cell's current total. during attacks or defence the opposing LSTs outright cancel out with a 1:1 ratio (Eufloria's seedlings have differing stats which are hard to determine, predict or control).
I'm going off on this tangent because PW's rules create levels of fast paced action where you have to work out which risks are worth taking as attacking diminishes your own forces and defending often involves sacrificing your own cells. Eufloria's rules prevents this kind of gameplay though, as a large enough attacking army will not incur many if any losses, and meteor's are considerably easier to protect.
I could go on but let's move to a fresh topic: story.
There isn't one.
Or rather, there's so little that you wonder why bother at all. You have some manner of commander who tells you to colonise worlds in preparation of the Growers. There are other seedling factions that you fight mostly because they are there, and there is also the grey infected seedlings who are made out to be worse but in gameplay terms they are just the same as everyone else.
At the very end your commander discovers that the greys were made by another seedling team and laments that all this infighting is pointless, a conclusion the player would have come to about 10 hours earlier.
It gets worse when you notice that your colour varies in each level so that in one level you might be red fighting green and then next level you are green fighting red. Briefly I thought that maybe the idea was that all the different teams had the same thought process and it is showing how pointless their struggles are. But then I remembered that there is some brief continuity between the missions and that idea went down in flames.
This vague attempt at plot just generates questions. Who/what is your commander? Who/what are you? Are you both seedlings? Are all the seedlings you've been sending to their doom thinking feeling beings? Since all the teams are the same apart from their colour, is the game just an allegory for racism?
Now for the positive elements of Eufloria, the visuals and sound. While peaceful music plays, stylised seedlings orbit around a flowering meteor. There's really not more that can be said. The graphics are consistent and the sounds appropriate for the atmosphere. This design coupled with the ease of play makes me suspect that this game was made to be played while incredibly high.
And that's really it for the positives, and the game as well. Anything else would be either repetition, trivial points or repetition.
One down, nine more to go.
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