If you're unfamiliar with the deliberately retro stylings of Britain's self-proclaimed Last of the Bedroom Programmers, then meet Introversion. They're the guys behind the multi-award-winning Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia and now the latter game's follow-up, Multiwinia. All of these projects share the team's love of non-fussy yet always engrossing game mechanics and refreshingly lo-fi old-school charm.

Some necessary background might be required to fully understand Multiwinia, however. Darwinia followed a race of virtual life forms, the Darwinians, whose simple server-side world (the eponymous Darwinia) was corrupted by a particularly nasty strain of virus, picked up from email spam. Your task was to rebuild wow powerleveling the virtual ecosystem through a series of pseudo-RTS-style missions. Like Lemmings, the player mostly exerted control over the Darwinians through indirect influence or by 'upgrading' them to controllable units; the former, at least, hasn't changed.

Multiwinia is a stripped down and streamlined multiplayer-only version of its forebear, designed mostly as an add-on to the upcoming Xbox wow powerleveling Live Arcade release of Darwinia; we're reviewing the PC standalone version that will retail at £20 or £15 for the downloadable version. This time there's no plot, no exposition; you hop into a match and play. As you'll already know if you've been following our extensive Multiwinia coverage, the game features six different game modes; Domination, King of the Hill, Capture the Statue, Rocket Riot, Blitzkrieg and Assault, with a selection of maps enabling up to four-player combat against either AI opponents or human foil.

It's a game built on an apocalyptically epic scale and it's almost impossible to resist the cataclysmic spectacle, your newly-spawned Darwinians traipsing across various weirdly coloured landscapes and crushing microscopic polygon enemy forces in their thousands. Winning criteria differs across Multiwinia's six game modes but the overall theme is about gaining and holding ground. For instance, in Capture the Statue wow gold you've got to secure land in order to transport giant figureheads (including a certain Companion Cube) back to your base; in Assault, the defender has to use his limited entrenched forces to hold off an unlimited horde for a given time period. Whatever the mode, there's an irresistible sense of fun and subtle humour that makes the polygonal atrocities both exciting and endearing, especially when it's a friend's multi-coloured minions on the receiving end of your amassed firepower.

Although Darwinia's core elements have been expanded to suit multiplayer gaming in Multiwinia, it still remains a conceptually limited strategy game. Perhaps more so, following the removal of Darwinia's gesture-activated weapon system, it's a game that thrives on superficial spectacle, eschewing deeper game mechanics for visceral thrills. That said, there are some notable additions to Multiwinia's borrowed mechanics. Now you can promote Darwinians to Officers at will, enabling you to direct your tiny army's flow from spawn points or to create formations. Admittedly, there's only one possible formation available - wow gold phalanx - but it makes a big difference in combat, marshalling your Darwinians into a structure that's much more vicious from the front, and very vulnerable from the sides. To further aid your assault, you've also access to weapon drops, which is perhaps where the game comes a little unstuck.