Do you like tactical games? Frozen Synapse is a great real-time simultaneous turns squad-based game.

Confused? Don't be. Let me explain: You have two players, each with a team of soldiers. Each player picks his soldiers' moves secretly. When they're both ready, they submit their moves and they are played out simultaneously.

It's really nothing like anything I've ever played. It's great, refreshing, brain-twisting gameplay and that's the stuff that actually matters in games, trust me.

There are a few problems which should not go without mention though: First, there's no support for more than two players. So you can't play co-op against the computer and you can't team up with others. Second, the gameplay feels a little barren, sometimes, the gameplay elements are too few. You could use this same argument against chess of course, so I'm not sure how valid it is.

Overall, it's a unique game that plays well so it's all good in my book.

In most RTS games, resource-gathering and military power are two mostly separate things. In Darwinia, your resources are actually the souls of dead units and you need to harvest them soon after you kill them.

This choice between harvesting and military is very dynamic. You can and have to change your tactics fast to deal with the situation. You have a low maximum number of units but there is no build time. However, you can only build at certain locations, so waiting time depends on where the battle is taking place.

Third, micro-management is quite different from what you're used to: You don't just click to attack, you decide exactly where your soldiers shoot. Macro-management is really narrative-driven. Levels have very different goals with each other and winning feels more like solving a puzzle than managing and allocating resources.

Darwinia is a weird little game, it's one of those things that broaden your horizons. That's why it shouldn't be missed.

Nice, varied puzzles, that depend more on reactive thinking and internalising the physics rules rather than sterile calculation of future states.

It doesn't drag on, the atmostphere is fantastic and it has a lot of replay value if you want to really delve into it, with the extra challenges and whatnot.

Definitely one of my favourite games ever.