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dkirschner's Eufloria (PC)
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| [May 2, 2013 03:26:14 AM]
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I had a dire urge to finish this game today. Plus I have far too many games open that I need to finish or close. I might close one or two after this and clean my list up.
I don't remember where I got Eufloria. It may have been some indie sale on Steam, or perhaps Humble Bundle. I had thought it looked neat when I first saw it, but didn't buy because of the garbage reviews. Tried it out, and Eufloria is definitely a case where I disagree with review scores. It's sitting at 63 on Metacritic but I'd give this at least 20 points higher. It could be that I have affection for the genre. Eufloria is very much like Galcon Fusion, a little space game where you take over other planets with colored triangles. Instead of triangles, Eufloria has seedlings, and the game has a little more depth to it.
Just like Galcon, your planets constantly spawn seedlings, if you've planted a seedling tree (forget the proper names). You can plant x number of trees on each planet depending on the level. In addition to the seedling tree, you can choose a defensive tree, which sprouts little defensive seedlings if that planet gets attacked. For every seedling tree you have on a planet, that planet spawns more seedlings. You don't necessarily want to go maxing out seedling trees on all your planets though because, like Galcon, there are different planet sizes and bigger is usually better. There are 3 stats, energy (health/toughness), strength (attack), and speed that each planet has to varying degrees. Usually larger planets have better stats, so you want to focus spawning seedlings on larger planets becauuuuse seedlings inherit the stats of the planet they spawned on.
Another addition to the Galcon formula are flowers and mines. When your seedling trees get big enough (trees grow and become more effective over time) they sprout a flower, which you can float from planet to planet and finally plant in order to boost the effectiveness of seedlings from one of your seedling trees. When your defensive trees get big enough, they sprout a mine, which does very good damage to swarms of enemy seedlings. You can move flowers and mines around just like you move your seedlings.
So that's the game. Grow, expand, conquer. The single-player story mode is the majority of the fun. You progress through a not-terribly-exciting story that really sucks at the end. I admit I was intrigued for a while, but nothing really happens and it gets predictable, and the end is completely unsatisfying. But the missions themselves are sweet. They vary only a little bit, but that little bit was just enough for me because I enjoyed the basic game progression so much. I can see how other people might get very bored of Eufloria. There are 25 levels. One you have to hold out for 10 minutes, one you have to amass a 200-seedling swarm, and there are just a few others with objectives other than 'kill everything.'
The pace of the game is slow. Very slow. It reminded me of Osmos in its pacing, and certainly not Galcon because Galcon is frantic. There's some nice ambient music to set the mood and a simple UI. The graphics are simple and elegant. I like the curves of the tree roots going to the core of the planet. You can zoom in and out. If you zoom in on a battle, you see all your individual units flying around fighting. You can see how damaged units and trees are because they start turning red. I wish there were some way to send masses of units aside from individually click-dragging every single planet. All the clicking got tiresome. Galcon let you select a handful of planets at once. Why didn't Eufloria do this? Maybe it was to stay in line with the simplicity of everything else, but it was the functional equivalent of giving every single unit a move command in an RTS. Unnecessary!
Slow paced game, requires some patience. If you aren't a patient person, you'll hate Eufloria. If you want to sit and relax and not think too much, it's a nice game. Oh, it is a bit on the easy side. You can generally swarm most levels to win. A couple trip up that strategy. Because swarming works about all the time though, I did catch the levels feeling samey by the end. Nonetheless, I like what the game offers. After beating the single-player I played some of the Skirmish maps. There are 8, and I completed 6, and skipped the last two because they are also mostly all 'kill everything.' Then there is some other game mode where the colors are inverted or something and it looks weird. I didn't like that. Wish there was an online mode. That's what made Galcon so much fun after getting the hang of it against the computer.
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dkirschner's Eufloria (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 23 March, 2013
GameLog closed on: Thursday 2 May, 2013 |
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