Mento's May Madness: #5 - Eufloria
by mento
01/05/12 - Amnesia: The Dark Descent 12/05/12 - Nimbus 24/05/12 - Chime 02/05/12 - Blocks That Matter 13/05/12 - Puzzle Bots 25/05/12 - Diamond Dan 03/05/12 - Capsized 14/05/12 - Rhythm Zone 27/05/12 - Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time 04/05/12 - Delve Deeper 15/05/12 - Starscape 28/05/12 - The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom 05/05/12 - Eufloria 17/05/12 - Tobe's Vertical Adventure 30/05...
05/05/12 - Game #5
The game: Omni Creative Group International's Eufloria.
The source: I'd imagine some sort of bundle. No idea which.
The pre-amble: Eufloria is a.. I don't know what the kids call it these days. Tranced out? Ambient? Something fancy for "relaxing". It's an arty-farty flower simulator that's actually a generic RTS in disguise. Build spawners, send troops against enemy forces and take over all the nodes until you are the sole victor. But with seeds and trees and shit.
The playthrough: Remember how I said yesterday that I blessed my lucky stars that Delve Deeper turned out not to be one of those interminable RTS games I don't particularly care for? Well, karma must've remembered that time I butchered all those prostitutes, because Eufloria was next up and is as RTS as they come. Despite how meticulous the designers were in making the interface as soothing and stress-free as possible, it doesn't quite work in practice when you're frantically deploying tiny seed flyer things as they appear to every asteroid on the front line offensive to fight back a horde of enemy flora. I played the tutorial levels and a few of the "main game" levels, and while it's usually smart design to incrementally introduce new elements rather than drop them all on your head from the offset, it sure got old fast.
That isn't to say that this is a bad game. The main goal of this Steam backlog-busting exercise (besides attention) is to ascertain what's going on in all these mystery games that I've ended up with because they were the fourth or fifth game in an Indie bundle or something impulsively chosen from 's many generous giveaways. As such, while this is clearly not my kind of game and was never going to be as made abundantly clear during the reasonably fair shake I gave it, I don't doubt this is a well-crafted Indie RTS game that's worth a look if you're into this kind of format and want something a bit mellower than your usual expeditious xenomorphs, trundling tanks or odiously odorous orcs. But man, if I never play another game where I'm constantly compelled to build things and send them out to fight other, similar things in hour-long battles of attrition, I'd die content.
To end on a positive note, though, it does have a neat scientific concept forming the basis behind it, namely Dyson trees. I prefer Dyson spheres myself though, all jokes about loving balls aside. I wonder when that game's coming?
The verdict: No thank you.
