Liquid War

Fittingly the first game I want to feature is the first one I downloaded when I discovered Ubuntu.

Liquid War!

War! With liquids!



The aim of Liquid War is to absorb your opponents and dominate the play area. It's a cute idea and for the most part it's play mechanic holds up well.

There are a large number of maps to choose from, with different obstacles requiring a different approach to annihilating you foe.

You don't control your liquid army directly, however, using your cursor you give a direction of advance for your little puddle to follow.

Although the game is rather unpleasantly presented with an acid green user interface with blurry pink text, and a set of sounds that will make you think about going to the loo slightly too often, the game has charm. There's something about the straightforward nature of the play that is, well, not exactly addictive, but does bring you back for more.

The battles themselves can be fought against real people online or against up-to five AI players.
I've never managed to get a game going online because no one else seems to be playing this game. I think that's going to be a common theme with games on Ubuntu.

The AI do a passable job at keeping you busy, but they don't seem to spot opportunities to strangle you, or indeed spot you creeping up behind them, so the overall experience tends to follow a pattern: dominate the field, corner the enemy, grind away at wearing them down.

I seem to spend most of my time prising them off of obstacles and out of hiding places pixel-by-pixel. This formula means that while the game could be potentially quite interesting against humans, against the AI it's more a battle of will than anything else.

Imagining, for a moment, and this is pure speculation, but imagining I'd played against other human opponents I can see how the game is incredibly well balanced. You can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with a relatively modest army, and because of the way the game decides who's absorbing who, you can give a much larger liquid army the runaround for a while until they make a mistake. But that's pure extrapolation based on my lonely, lonely singly player game.

If the game was spruced up and reinvigorated with some online play I can imagine it being something to come back to, but as it is, in it's current state, it's a passing curiosity.

Worth a look but don't get your hopes up.

Details:
Price: Free
Available from: Software Centre (search Liquid war)
Developer website: http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5