Darwinism Review From those great people at PlayToMax comes another great game for the Firefox OS Phone, iOS, Android devices. This time it is Darwinism, and is all about evolving creatures into other creatures. PlayToMax is a really cool game company in Kiev (or Kyiv), Ukraine. This game reminds me a little of Boom Town, an HTML5 game that AppMobi created to demonstrate that you could make one HTML5 game and port it to every possible form factor. Darwinism is similar to Boom Town, only in that it uses a clever way to adapt a match-three game to something else besides falling jewels. So here"s how Darwinism starts. Colorful, good art, gets right to the point of things. The splash screen lets you Play the game, get some hints on what evolves to what, gives you Help, and allows you to turn off the music (but the music is really great). If you press the question mark for Help, here is what you get: you see the game board and learn fire burns and that you need to match three of a kind to create a new species. That is the essence of the game, but there"s more. If you go back to the main menu and choose Evolution, you"ll get a little taste of how the game works. Right here at the start, you can see that the Amoeba is the lowest animal (one-celled) and that they then can turn into a Jellyfish. How? By combining them! Just get three Amoebas and you"ve got yourself a nice purple Jellyfish. And then ... get three Jellyfish and you can turn them into a Fish. But before you start, Darwinism gives you something that most games don"t, but should. You can choose between Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, and Ultimate. I really like this kind of thing because I can learn the game on the Easy setting and then work my way up to Ultimate. I also really like the extra touch that PlayToMax takes by making the choices look like carvings. A lot of work went into this game and it adds up to a great experience. You can only choose Easy at first anyway, but the point is that this game has a lot of replay value. So when you start out Easy, you are given a mission: create a Lizard! By following the pictures, you can see that you need to use Amoeba to make Jellyfish, and then on to Fish, and finally onto ... Lizards. Seems logical to me. Fish can become Lizards. So now you"re ready to start evolving. The game even walks you through the steps the first time. You have a 5 by 5 grid that you play in. The piece you play is above the grid on the left. You simply tap where you want to put the piece. Put the Amoeba next to another Amoeba. Working up your way on the evolutionary ladder, eventually you"ll combine three Fish and make a red Lizard.You"ve finished the first round! You also have a score of 3000, reflecting how long it took you to get there. So all this fits together neatly to make a game that you can play for a few minutes at a time, and do some thinking while you do it. And the music is fun to listen to, nice percussion music that evokes the primitive world.
Source: http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2013/12/darwinism-game-review.html