Last week, the demo for the PSN version of Euploria was released. Euphloria is a PC game that was released in 2009 and is now available for the PS3, App stores, and a few other places. Like many "indie" games of late, Eufloria has a relaxing tone with smooth visuals and lax music. If you stay awake for long enough after experiencing the atmosphere, you are presented with an RTS game. Like other RTS, the goal of Eufloria is a expand your territory throughout the surrounding area. This is done with Seedlings that grow from flowers planted on your asteroid(your home base). When you get a certain amount of seedlings, you can float to other asteroids(neighboring bases) and attempt to plant more Flowers onto them. If you are successful in implanting your seedlings into the asteroid, it will become part of your territory and produce more seedlings. This continues until you clear the objective; usually to take complete control of a certain area.
Our favorite real-time strategy games have obstacles to overcome. Euphloria is no different. You will encounter enemy seeds that must be eradicated. If you allow them to flourish, they may invade your territory and eliminate your forces. The only way to prevent this is by invading them too! When 2 forces are growing at the same rate, there is no real way for either side to create an advantage. In this sense, you cannot simply grow a force of 10 seedlings and fight the opposing 10(plus whichever ones are born during the skirmish). To get ahead in Euphloria, the player has to take over unoccupied asteroids quickly to generate more seedlings. Each asteroid has a stat value for speed and strength, so there is some strategy in deciding the path your army should extend. Like other RTS games, the best players are those who can micro-manage their forces into smaller groups. It is easy to grow 10 seedlings on 2 asteroids and send them all away to fight an enemy. But what if they flank your team during the attack? This is where RTS games, and Eufloria actually becomes fun.
Perhaps the best part about Eufloria is the Fast-forward feature. Without this, Eufloria would be far too boring to actually call relaxing. There are times you will turn it off, such as to counter an invasion. For many players, FF will be the default playing speed and turning it off could be called a "slow-down" option. Other features of Eufloria include the ability to zoom in and see intricate details in the level. Is this necessary for combat or strategy? No; actually it is more difficult to navigate between asteroids when the camera is zoomed in. You do get some visuals on how seedlings actually kill a flower, but nothing much besides that. In later levels, your seedling arsenal will actually change. Based on the flowers you plant, you can develop seedlings with additional speed, power, health and other goodies. The flowers you plant may also have their own abilities, like defensive plants the will fight back against the seedlings. Unfortunately, the Demo will only give you a small taste of how intricate the game will be in the later levels.
Patience is the key to liking Eufloria. It will be slow to start, and the visuals probably won't help those with short attention spans. It does have very entertaining moments though, so let's not dismiss it entirely. On our home consoles, we do not get many games like Eufloria to play. For those who like to dip their gamer thumbs into different experiences, Eufloria may actually be a lot of fun for you. Above all else, it costs you nothing but time(and some harddrive space to try the demo for yourself.
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