Dyson certainly isn't your average real-time strategy game. For one thing it's independently developed, and it's also quite an abstract brain teaser. The setting is an asteroid belt, with a theme of planting trees and growing seedlings. A rather hippy vibe which may have you wearing flowers in your hair (and perhaps making an unscheduled trip to San Francisco).

The concept is one of a rather laid back war, with a streamlined interface to direct it, all played out to some gentle ambient tunes in the background. Beginning with one asteroid, a single tree and some seedlings, the player must use the seedlings to swarm across space and take over new rocks.

Claiming an asteroid is simply a matter of clicking and dragging an arrow from one of yours to another, which sends all available seedlings to attack. Once taken over, you can order seedlings to plant themselves, letting a new tree take root which creates more new seedlings. The strategy revolves around deciding how fast to expand and how quickly to use seedlings to plant without leaving yourself too low on numbers to defend your empire if attacked.

There's a slight twist with the asteroids, namely that they imbue the seedlings produced on them with specific health, attack and speed statistics, so some are more valuable than others. The game's mechanics engineer an impressive balance between ease of play and strategic depth, with just enough substance to give your tactical mettle a good testing.

Dyson's interface only has one weak spot. It's a cinch to order a full invasion, or right-click to send a single scout seedling out, but any other number of units must be specified with multiple right-clicks. Thus sending half an army on a mission is a rather clumsy process, and we'd have definitely welcomed some sort of hot-key system to facilitate troop selection by larger percentage increments.

There are also some apparent balance issues still to resolve. When we initially tackled one mission we got quite quickly and viciously trounced, and then on attempt number two we breezed through with no problems. However, Dyson isn't quite the finished product yet and the developer is still working on fine tuning.

Even so, it's pretty polished overall and provides six missions to get your rocks off to, all for the price of absolutely nothing. You certainly can't moan about that sort of value for money.

Verdict
Dyson is a cleverly designed and interestingly abstract strategic dollop of space conquest. It's well worth a download, even if there are still some slight rough edges here and there.

Company: Rudolf Kremers and Alex May

Tags: seedling san francisco asteroid tree zynga farmville department of environment and natural resources agriculture