Eufloria is a indie strategy game that recently came out for PSN. It originally came out for PC though and has spread to PSN and the iPad. I had seen this game quite a few times on PC, but I had never played it. It came out on PC back in 2009, but the PSN release arrived on October 4th, 2011. The PSN add's new features to the game, but still keeps all of the same fundamentals from the PC version. Eufloria feels like a super polished version of a game that you would see on the free arcade websites Armor Games or Kongregate. It has you capturing asteroids with your seeds, then you plant trees upon the asteriods to grow more seeds. The seeds are basically little fighter planes, but you need ten seeds to plant any type of tree, of which there are quite a few. Each asteroid you capture has different statistics, so whatever seeds that you grow off of the trees on that partciular asteroid will be different from all of the other asteroids. Eufloria's ambient theme for graphics and music are much like the games Flow or Osmos. Eufloria wasn't received that well originally, on PC, but it has been garnering a little bit better reviews for the PSN version, so I decided to download the hour long demo and check it out.



The gameplay of Eufloria is seemingly simple, capture asteriods and plant trees, but the game is a little bit more complex then that. The complexity comes from strategy, different tree types, map layout and multiple, for lack of a better word, factions. The game starts you out really slow, having you capture a couple asteriods with no resistance, just to get used to the controls and how things work. Eventually you end up on large maps with ten or more asteriods, most of which are under the control of enemy factions. The two tree types I got to see in the demo are the guardian tree and the seed tree. The seed tree pumps out the most basic fundamental unit in the game, seeds, but the way they move and fight is determined by the statistics of their asteroid. The guardian tree is basically a asteroid defense tree, one that launches out little "missiles" that take out any incoming enemy seeds. Each level has a specific cap on each asteroid for how many trees you can build, so it really matters how you mix up the different tree types, especially with aggressive enemies. The trees that plant on asteroid will grow and the bigger they are the harder they will be to capture. For instance, on the last level in the demo one of the last asteroids I had to take had four guardian trees on it, normally one guardian tree is hard to deal with. So, controlling the rest of the map I amassed an army of three hundred seeds and quite literally swarmed that asteroid before the "missiles" could take out too many of my seeds.



Eufloria is all about exploring space, defeating enemies and biological growth. It does all of that quite well, but it's not a great game, especially for the price. It is currently $15 on PC and PSN, no idea how a game that came out two years ago is still it's original price on steam. It does offer quite a bit of length to it, especially with extra skirmish missions and a "relaxing mode" to accompany the lengthy campaign. My grip with the game is that it takes a while to start getting you hooked, it starts off quite slow and only get's interesting later on. Eufloria is definitely worth trying, especially if you like Osmos or Flow, it has the same kind of feel, but a greatly different game type than either of those games, but I would warn against buying it unless you really feel taken with it. It has gotten good reviews (7-8's out of 10), but not great, and there are better things to spend $15 on at the moment. If you want to check out the steam page of official website I will provide them below.  Thanks for reading and be back with more tonight.
Official Website: http://www.eufloria-game.com/news.php
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/41210/


-Written by Sean Cargle