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Review: Eufloria
- Title: Eufloria
- Developers: Alex May, Rudolf Kremers
- Publisher: Omni Systems
- System: Windows
- Reviewer: eldavojohn
- Score: 6/10
The game's graphics and soundtrack are seemingly procedurally generated. If you find things like OS X and the Wii simple and aesthetically pleasing, then this game's for you. The very first thing I noticed was zooming. This game makes you feel as if you're staring at a petri dish, and you're capable of watching from 30,000 feet with little bugs flying around asteroids or you can zoom in and observe the battles the bugs are having. The music is very ambient and strangely soothing. Not only do your seedlings grow procedurally (depending on when you click the plant button) but the music seems to react to your movements and the commands sent to your guys. It's really an enjoyable experience that can make the hours melt away as you listen and enjoy the organic movement and music.
The gameplay is reminiscent to that of Risk ... except vastly simpler. The early levels basically run themselves, and it becomes increasingly complicated and more difficult. Multiple enemies, different kinds of weapons and decreased odds of winning slowly stack more and more against you. In this respect, patience is often a virtue as you grow more seedlings or wait for two enemies to attack each other, giving you a chance to win. Several times, however, my territory served as a battle area for the AI, destroying any chance I had. The early strategies being simple, I found myself employing a scout and move strategy to stay alive in later levels.
For what this game tries to be, it succeeds. The downsides of the game are more the additional features than a shortcoming in the design or the gameplay. As levels grew larger and more complex, I found myself staying at the highest possible view of my seedlings and conquered asteroids. It became a numbers game, with the strategy focusing on where to set up defense and where to set up offense. This becomes necessary to be aware of everything going on around you, but it reduces the graphics of the procedurally-generated trees and flights of your seedlings to blurry dots on the screen. While aiding you, it removes you from the things that make this game beautiful. An unfortunate side effect, for me.
Another flaw of the game is a pretty weak storyline. With trees and seedlings as your "actors," there's not a whole lot of human emotion and therefore the storyline (while containing a twist) seems weak and tacked on. Along with that, the game is short. You could squeeze perhaps 20 hours out of this game ... depending on how much patience you have. If you start doing bad at a level, you can always just start over and wait for the computer AI to slip up. The AI is not the best in this game. Several times the computer could have wiped me off the map ... but for some unknown, humanitarian reason chose not to. While that made it much easier for me, it sure destroyed my sense of accomplishment. All too often I got away with being very poorly defended.
The last complaint is a common one: no online mode. I imagine all my strategies would be revolutionized were I pitted against other players. When you play this game, you'll realize that it has a lot of player-versus-player potential, like the majority of RTS games rely on. And yet, there is no online or even LAN capabilities. Unfortunately, multi-player is not in the plans for Dyson's future.
Eufloria is a beautiful game and is priced reasonably. If you're an RTS fan, this game's for you. If you're a gamer who'd rather be planting bullets than trees, or a gamer who needs multi-player online play then this game isn't for you ... but it might be a nice break to steal away every now and then for a few moments of ambient music and procedurally-generated beauty.
I bet this game never loses 'suction'! :)
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
Civ is NOT real-time strategy. Why should I take the rest of your review seriously??
If you find things like OS X and the Wii simple and aesthetically pleasing, then this game's for you.
As long as you don't, you know, expect to actually run it using OS X or Wii...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I will always know "euflooria" term as a winner in the monthly neologism contest run by Washington, DC columnist Bob Levey. It refers to the sensation of being on the Beltway in free-flowing traffic when the other side is at a standstill in a traffic jam.
The images on the official website aren't loading (probably slashdotted already), but even if they were, I don't think I'd have had a very good sense of what this game looks like without a video.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBXpNpwDFzw
Gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EneQefAchHQ
Reminds me a little of another recent independent game, Osmos. Check it out at http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/
For people who like abstract open-source games, Cultivation is a very interesting tiny (400k, 300k 7-zip compressed) game. You need to grow a garden, mate, and have children to win the game.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
Speaking of Civ...what's your favorite Civ variant. Right now, I'm having a lot of fun with the open-source [1] C-evo. It's a tiny Civ clone; the base game is 1.4megs 7zip compressed (without sound). Yes, this game fits on a single floppy. You'll need a second floppy disk to fit the sounds (about 900k). [1] The game is public domain with source code available, but the game is written in the proprietary language Delphi. No, it won't compile in Lazarus without work done on it; we've tried.
MaraDNS is an open-source DNS server.
Snooooozerrr.
A) Create a logical thought process B) Why unnecessarily confuse readers? C) When did Slashdot become a place for crackpot game reviews? Isn't this supposed to be a news (or something approximating it) site? D) I'm trying to figure out what you mean half the time with all your squinting modifiers... E) Why bring up OSX, which this game won't run on, or conjure up the Wii, which focuses on hand gestures when this game does not, and is an unsuitable platform for RTS...?
I'm not quite sure based on the review, but is anything procedurally generated in this game?
From the demo download page: "You may have some luck running the Windows version in a VM like Wine." I would have thought that a game developer might be able to do a bit better than that.
The article lost any credibility to me when it mentioned the "novel game mechanics" of Spore, which is nothing more a collection of boring mini-games that are all simplistic and non-challenging versions of actual games, along with a glorified avatar customization system.
There was a Linux version available. Here's hoping that they make a release for the final version :)
Lately, I have become enamoured with legal, DRM-free digital download content providers such as gog.com (for games) and filmbaby.com (for indie movies). There are many similar sites, but they come burdened with DRM, which I am not interested in supporting or being bogged down by. Given the slashdot community's general dislike for DRM, and hopefully support for indie developers of content, I am hoping you folks can suggest other such sites. So - care to share any favourites?
cheers,
Andrew
Go get your googles:
- Galcon, better version of the Stars! idea.
- Gratitous Space Battles. strategic shop design
- Mount & Blade. Medieval sandbox withouth termination date (infinite gameplay) with a awesome community (YES, there are a LOTR and German and Star Wars mods)
- Plants and Zombies (there are zombies on your lawn)
- Puzzle Quest
And If you want FPS arcade:
- Tremulous (gloom like gameplay)
- OpenArena (quake3 like gameplay)
-Woof woof woof!
0 is as bad as it gets.
10 is as good as it gets.
5 should be precisely halfway between the best and the worst, half of all games produced are better, and half are worse. I.e., average (or median for all you pedantic statistics geeks).
I guess it's a fool's errand to try to stop everyone from messing up scoring systems with absurd use of superlatives like "ultraorgasmic".
Perhaps we can start rating games like people rate eBay sellers:
"Great game! Would definitely play again! A+++++++++++++++++++!!!"
I hate printers.
I'll just play this instead.
This appears to be based on Freeman Dyson's essay "The Greening of the Galaxy," published in the autobiographic essay collection Disturbing the Universe.
He implies that the whole paradigm of current-model humans settling on Earthlike worlds is rather unlikely, suggesting instead tailoring life of all sorts -- including trees -- to live on comets and Oort cloud bodies.
I thought it was 10-[rating] price drops before it's worth buying. So something rated a 1 would need 9 price drops before it's worth buying. Of course, most stores wouldn't keep inventory around that long, so you don't have to worry about buying those. It's the 4's and 5's (6 and 5 price drops) that you eventually spend $5 bucks on when you are drunk, bored, and broke just to have a new game to play.
And strangely enough, being drunk and bored is enough to make the game enjoyable.
Even if the middle score (5, assuming you allow the full range of 0-10) means that the game is 'average', then 6 would be 'slightly above average'.
Which technically, isn't 'completely sucks', but when you have to decide between games that are near average, and those that are actually 'good' or 'excellent', it comes down to giving the average games a pass.
So, as both 'slightly above average' and 'suck' to me means 'not worth my time to play' and/or 'not worth buying', then yes, '6' and 'rock bottom suckiness' are the same.
(and it's not basic math, it's economics -- specifically, 'opportunity cost'.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That's the problem with providing a score (e.g. between 0 and 10) but not an explanation of what they mean. It's probably not reasonable to use the median because there are a lot of crappy games out there. So much so that it would probably inflate the scores of any reasonably hyped, passable game up to the 8 or 9 range.
Furthermore, the median only makes sense at a particular point in time. As an exercise, suppose that I release a large number of really crappy games--a number so large as to equal the total number of games in existence. All of these games are rated below 3. According to your metric, that would push up all of the rest of the games to higher-than-average scores. But no one's going to go back and review those game scores to correct them, and it doesn't change the fact that the games were still crappy to begin with.
Wait -- I'm not supposed to read the review if I'm planning to play the game?
What if I'm not sure if I'll like the game - wouldn't reading the review be a natural way to figure out whether I should try it?
I guess if I'm undecided, I am not yet *planning* to play the game, so I should read the review. Shoot, what if I read the review and it sounds perfect for me? I will have at the same time ruined the game by exposing myself to all the spoilers.
The difference between real time strategy and turn based strategy is the amount of time you are given to take your turn before it is skipped.
A turn based strategy gives you large or infinite time to plot each turn, while a real time strategy game may give you a fraction of a second. However they are, fundamentally the same at their core.
Yeah, just like in school, where a 50 was right in the middle of the C range.
Oh, wait, no, 50-60 was a completely failing grade for the vast majority of my classes from kindergarten to grad school, except for a few anal-retentive types only half-educated in statistics who thought that the normal distribution was the only one in existence.
The average game sucks.
I'm confused, where are the pointless buxom three-dee graphics with realistic jiggle effects!? I can't see how this game could ever attract gamers!?
http://www.beanleafpress.com
You can't equate the scoring to school.
Letter Grades are how much you SHOULD be learning, and are completely independent on averages. An easy class means 90% easy, the average is higher. A tougher class means that getting 70% is tougher, and the average is lower.
Many Engineering students drop out because of how tough the classes are. A friend of mine, wrote his first exam in Engineering, and got a 35% on it. After the Prof Curved the grade, he got an A-.
In other words - when someone gives you a 1 - 10 scale, assume that the very center is average, and that each unit of difference is equal to each other (the difference between 6 and 7 is the same as 4 to 5 and so on). Don't go arbitrarily adding Letter grade reference points because those were designed for the very specific reason of grading students, and NOT video game reviews.
Only if you assume a linear scale. Which, if you have any experience with game reviews, you must realize isn't true regardless of the claim.
From experience, game reviews are scored on a logarithmic scale with the baseline. Which ironically also actually fits how many of our senses work.
a game from a vacuum cleaner company to suck ?
Nullius in verba
You and the reviewer should be ashamed at how useless your contributions are.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Reading that review was kind of like reading and reviews or something, I give it a 5 out of A. If you like games then the review. But it was good.
Didn't you mean "isn't a rehashed Warcraft" or Starcraft? These are the games that "defined" the genre, not AoE.
Little square boxes or folders that hold round thingamabobs that holds them bits-n-bytes. Although they mostly *lose* the bytes they're meant to hold. I have a whole crate full at home. I even use them from time to time. I hope my bits are still in there, I want to play Master of Orion and Darklands (all 8 disks!) tonight.
[grumpy old man mode] Now get off my lawn! [/grumpy]
Whew, almost forgot to turn off grumpy mode. That would've been bad.
a visually and aurally pleasing game
Sure, but is it orally pleasing?
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
I played this game frequently for about a month. The reviewer clearly hasn't played the game for very long. While there are a lot of things to like about this game, it gets quite quite repetitive. Also, the AI is not very good. Once you figure out some basic strategy, the AI is no match for you. If the game had multiplayer, it be worth the $20. It's just too too repetitive to actually play for very long against the computer.
Mod parent up. As an engineering graduate, i can attest that i've taken exams where 20% was a passing grade.
Am I the only one who is reminded of the Little Prince by the graphics of this game?
What a total ripoff!
Jk. But really, I am very pleased by the aesthetics of this game.
My page.
You seem to be the right person to ask in the thread then...
What is the objective of the game/each level? Somehow, amongst all of the complaints/defending of the game/review, that still doesn't seem to be mentioned.
The game's standard campaign (contrasted with user-generated levels which I have not played around with yet, though there is a community of mission makers on the official forums) generally picks one of two criteria for winning. Depending on the mission, you must either:
1. Colonize every asteroid in the map.
2. Eradicate those species that are not your own.
You start off each level owning a particular asteroid, and you may have some seedling-generating trees and/or some seedlings with which to spread your colony, and perhaps you will have some defense trees as well. You start off with a fog of war that prevents viewing the particular objects on other asteroids as well as asteroids that are too far from territory you own. Up to an asteroid's total capacity of trees, you may spend ten seedlings and either sprout a tree to generate more seedlings or a tree that protects that one asteroid with homing missiles.
Given a single seedling, you may scout any other asteroid within range (one of the planet's attributes) of one of your owned asteroids in order to lift the fog of war, displaying all activity that occurs near the previously-undiscovered asteroid. Any number of seedlings may be commanded to take a journey through your claimed territory, and if they happen upon an empty asteroid, you can plant ten of them on it and one of either kind of tree that you may create is sufficient to claim the asteroid. If the asteroid is already inhabited, a battle will ensue. Your seedlings will now attack their trees and their seedlings! You may not use this asteroid to jump to another directly because you do not own it, but you may retreat, recalling your seedlings to an asteroid you own. If you succeed in destroying an enemy tree, your seedlings start infiltrating the root system of the planet, attacking its gradually-replenishing core energy. If enough seedlings are allowed to infiltrate to reduce the core energy to zero, you immediately gain ownership of the asteroid; the destroyed tree is now a seedling of a seedling-generator tree and all of the remaining trees change ownership to you.
The rest of the gameplay mechanics are smaller details: old seedling-generator trees will eventually produce a flower which can be used to upgrade any tree you own to make it produce super-seedlings or an exploding battleship of sorts, depending on which type of tree you upgraded. There is a cap to how many seedlings an asteroid will generate if left ignored. Attributes of the asteroid confer better speed or strength or infiltration efficiency to the seedlings generated by that asteroid. That's mostly it, though. I hope this is a good summary; the user manual is huge but I feel playing the demo and reading this summary should be enough to understand the game!
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Sounds entertaining.
It really is a shame that this game isn't planned to be multiplayer, as it sounds like it has potential. That said, one of my roommates has been playing Mushroom Wars (I believe it is called), which is a PSN title that is an interesting take on the RTS genre as well, but we both feel that the game promotes defensive play way too much, which would make multiplayer absolutely terrible. So maybe it's for the best, or maybe Eufloria may not suffer from that, and something cool with multiplayer could happen.
Plenty worth the $20 for me because this is the first RTS game I've ever really enjoyed :) I would love to play a multiplayer version if ever one was developed; the concept of a "zerg rush" is foreign to this game off the bat due to the requirement of colonization of intermediate asteroids before being able to reach enemies that are not neighbors. The balance between defense and offense feels good; even a planet full of grown defensive trees will fall almost instantly to a large enough swarm of enemy seedlings, so you must have a defensive force of seedlings available in order to have a defense at all once the levels progress and colony sizes grow.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Sounds unique enough to be worth experiencing, at least. As a game designer, I'm certainly interested.
Thanks for all of the insight, by the way.
It's like people want to support non-main stream developers (there are tons of them) but are afraid if they suggest that horror mind bender with 2001 graphics people will no be open to it.
You can do all that but in the end you just crush stuff with your 500 seedling army and if one thing is better than another that's nice but you captured both anyway (and it's not like the missions let you pick what to conquer anyway, almost all require capturing everything).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Multiplayer just wouldn't work. The first one to grab a valuable asteroid (and the way the game is set up those would not be fairly distributed) or get a flower at the right time will win. As always I'll point at Kernel Panic which doesn't have such randomness despite being resourceless as well (and is free instead of 20$).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Silly american grading system. :) Over the pond, 50-100% is the range of pass grades used in university courses, allowing for much greater granularity. You can get through on 45% at a pinch, as long as you average 50 or more.
There is an open source clone of Dyson called Quantum http://apistudios.com/hosted/marzec/quantum/
One of the common complaints that wasn't covered in this review was the lack of "Rally Points" in this game. It was requested several times on the steam forums but the developers there actively refused it (Source: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11634198&postcount=4).
When I tried the demo, the lack of Rally points made things very tedious when I wanted to pool together all my units on the perimeter in order to maximize defense. I would have to click each area and move everything manually.
This once again distracts from the graphical beauty of this game as it also forces you to remain zoomed out where you can hardly see anything noteworthy.
A turn based strategy gives you large or infinite time to plot each turn, while a real time strategy game may give you a fraction of a second. However they are, fundamentally the same at their core.
Ehhmmm, not really. Take, for example, games like the X-Com series or Jagged Alliance. An individual unit that is in hiding during your turn may come out, throw a grenade, moon you and duck back into cover all in the same turn, with the end result of you still not being able to return fire.
All these games do implement some sort of reaction fire, but in a number of cases you don't actually have any control over your units during that phase, so not quite the same thing as an RTS.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.