Speaking of Geometry Wars, Multiwinia lives in a very similar space: an eerie cyberworld where the graphics are no less strange for being simple. Instead of simulating something you know, these games imagine something you've never seen. The priority is on palette and shapes. And in Multiwinia's case, the wonderful sound does a lot of the heavy lifting.

Read the preview of Multiwinia after the jump.

As the developers at Introversion demonstrated with DEFCON, they know how to work a potent combination of simplicity and atmosphere. For example, Multiwinia, the sequel to Darwinia, in which you herded swarms of tiny pitiable 2D beings through imperiled virus-infected cyberworlds. It was partly a real time strategy game and partly a puzzle game. But now Multiwinia, which adds multiplayer support among other things, is all real time strategy game.

It's very action-paced, dependant on swooping your camera around these strange worlds, managing your jostling clusters of Darwinians (here called Multiwinians), and collecting and firing off special powers. A lot of the gameplay is in how the powers twist the basic rules of automated Multiwinians shooting their lasers at each other wherever they meet (and throwing the odd dramatic grenade). With the powers, a tank rampages across the landscape. An airstrike arrives, straight out of TRON. An uber-soldier or a turret wreaks havoc and breaks deadlocks. A scavenger roams around collecting and reviving dead soldiers.

Everything else is pretty simple. Capture spawn points to spawn more Multiwinians to capture more spawn points. Darwinia's puzzle worlds imagined some strange ecologies that seem to be missing here. Instead, the variety comes from the game types. The preview build I've been playing has a simple king of the hill mode with multiple capture locations that score points. It also has a statue capture mode where clusters of Multiwinians carry statues back to their bases, clustered under the statues' bases like chittering Pikmin. The more there are, the faster the statue is carried, but the fewer Multiwinians are free to fight. The final game, due later this year, will have more variations on these modes, playable against the AI or other players.