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If you know anything at all about this game, you know that it is a strategy game where the warring sides are bacteria, and the battlefields are microscope slides and Petri dishes. What you may not know, unless you've played the game, is how compelling this simple premise becomes once the action really begins.The team that developed BioFilm is only slightly less minuscule than the game's protagonists. Battery Acid Games is, as far as I can tell, a one-man show with the occasional guest helper. In any event, Derek Arndt (and co.), the people who brought you Mountain Tanks, have done a lot with a very little. There are definitely some parts of the game that lack big-company polish, but there are some really ingenious ideas here that show the true independent spirit so frequently lacking in the major titles. The Lay of the Lab As befitting a game whose main characters are single-celled creatures, the setting of BioFilm is appropriately basic. The playing field is a simple shape, usually an oval or rectangle, with a gently rippling background that is probably meant to suggest the liquid in which most bacteria live. There are "walls" and "trails" created by neutral bacteria, which create strategic opportunities and pitfalls in each screen. There are clouds of gas and clumps of dots, which represent the nutrients your bacteria are dependent on. Finally, there are a few clumps of little circles, ovals, triangles and so on, in different colors, which represent you and your opponents. Just like a strategy game set in the multi-cellular world, you start with a "base" area, and you must expand to other areas, gather resources, build your "army," and overwhelm your foe. There are some variations on this basic construction: unlit battlefields in which your "glowers" become absolutely vital, scenarios in which resources or hostage troops are behind walls of neutral bacteria, or both. One of the interesting twists in this game is that the "terrain features" are actually made of other bacteria, who will come after your troops (or your opponents) if you stray too close. Your bacterial army consists of a handful (or really, a dropper-full) of different types. There is the "basic" unit or what you might call a "grunt," there are suicide bomber units, units that immobilize the enemy when they are killed ("freezers"), support units that cannot attack directly but whose presence enhances the attacking power of your grunts, units that provide illumination when you are playing on one of the unlit battlefields, and harvesting units that can turn the gas clouds into resources the other units can use. All of these shapes are represented by circles, diamonds, and so on, in more or less solid colors. The units pulsate and wax and wane in size as they eat and grow or wither from lack of resources or dwindle under enemy attack. Continued growth ends in each unit splitting into two smaller copies of itself--no need to build barracks or factories here, just send a small force to a new resource area and watch it grow. An aside: The pulsating quality is so pervasive that after playing the game for a while and moving away from my Mac, everything circular I looked at seemed to be slightly throbbing for quite some time. However, unlike the game units, my dinner plate, for example, did not split into two smaller copies of itself no matter how long I stared at it (too bad).
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