Eufloria

This is just a beautiful game. The visuals are very minimalistic, but oh I love them. Just look at it...the art in this game looks like those soft drawings that you find in a fairytale book.

Eufloria is an indie real-time strategy game based on these little things, called seedlings. They grow on trees that grow on asteroids, with their roots deep into the asteroid core. While still on the tree, they look like flowers. After a short time, they fall off to become seedlings, which stay in orbit around the asteroid. You can move your seedlings to a new asteroid and colonize it by planting a tree. This is what it looks like when you colonise an asteroid:

To plant a new tree, you need 10 seedlings in orbit around an asteroid. There is a max amount of trees that you can plant on an asteroid, and each asteroid gives different attributes (strength, speed and energy) to the seedlings that are born on it. Fast seedlings are helpful to quickly explore new asteroids. Seedlings with high strength are good fighters. Yeah, they have fights. Very weird seedling fights. You have to fight the enemy seedlings and destroy their trees. Once one of their trees is down, seedlings will go down the roots of the dead tree to the core of the asteroid, and take it over by reducing the core energy to 0. Once this is done, the asteroid colony is yours.


This game really excels in simplicity, so you can't really compare it to other space exploration games with all their complex development and planet management involved. Eufloria is a game that anyone can play, without having to put too much thought to strategy. This lack of depth does get annoying fast, as the key to winning usually lies in just waiting to let your seedlings grow in number, and then attack. The AI doesn't seem capable of building trees, and thus usually doesn't use the asteroids to their full capacity. A player that does fully put their asteroids to use, will obviously win by sheer numbers in the long run. The waiting itself is very boring, as there's nothing else to do but plant trees as much trees that your asteroid allows, and then wait for the seedlings to grow. I often just let the game run while I went to eat lunch or take a nice long shower.

All in all, this is a beautiful little game, very easy and relaxing to play, though the lack of depth puts me off.

A free demo can be found here.