The Darwinians are still charming little stick-figures seemingly inspired by the Cactuars from an assortment of Final Fantasies; they spawn colour-coded at the outset of a match or at regular intervals from each base your colony captures. They control in much the same way they ever did, which is to say abstractly. The WASD keys and the mouse-wheel are solely for directing the floaty camera around, while the right and left mouse buttons allow you to pick out individual Darwinians from the swarms to issue with one of a scaled-back selection of commands. And when I say scaled-back, I mean bare bones enough that hardcore RTS fans will likely find themselves underwhelmed by the scarcity of options.
Aside from some turrets you can operate from a third-person perspective, officers are the extent of the limited direct control players have over their band of brothers. These single units can be promoted to point the way forward to all those who pass, or to lead stick-figure formations into battle with enemy Darwinians. It's as love-it or hate-it design decision as ever, but for those players who can see past the initially restrictive level of interaction between themselves and their minions, Multiwinia, like its forefather before it, achieves a feeling of purity that the vast majority of modern games — take note Assassin's Creed and the fabled one-button combat of Peter Molyneux's latest — can only dream of.
Multiwinia takes its cues from Darwinia as faithfully as you might expect from a pair of games due to be packaged together for distribution through Xbox Live Arcade. They share a great deal — not least the simplistic controls and interface, which are only the most superficial signs of the pared-down mentality that informs every aspect of Introversion Software's sort-of sequel. There are no resources to collect, no hero units to command nor any particularly complex tactics to overcome. Other than the officers — new, incidentally, to this iteration — players aren't able to order single Darwinians around, and for all that Multiwinia purports to be an RTS, the more complex strategies prove impossible to pull off.
A host of multiplayer modes and in excess of 50 maps means that you won't easily burn out on the uncomplicated moment-to-moment game play, which, in the end, largely consists of mustering a massive swarm of Darwinians to overwhelm the splintered forces of your human or AI opponents. Up to four such players can compete in the usual gamut of game-types, including Domination, your basic deathmatch; Blitzkrieg and King of the Hill, which are variations on capture and defend; and the self-explanatory Capture the Statue.
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