Eufloria tasks players with growing trees on small asteroids and expanding your seedling empire across the universe. Your empire quickly encounters a collective of diseased gray seedlings and rival empires, and must discover the link between them.

Eufloria is obviously an RTS, although almost nothing about it is conventional. Instead of turning one element of RTS gameplay on its side and slamming you over the head with a hook, it quietly and subtly presents many new approaches to the genre. Also, the game rarely ever presents the innovations to the player; rather, they realize them one at a time as they discover the strategic layers in Eufloria.

Each asteroid can support a preset amount of trees, usually three or four. Players can use ten seedlings to either plant Dyson trees (named for Freeman Dyson, a physicist who theorized that a tree-like plant could grow on certain comets), which create more seedlings, or defense trees, which drop homing bombs to ward off enemies. The seedlings are also your fighting force, hopping to asteroids, destroying enemy seedlings and trees, and “capturing” the planetoids by planting themselves in their cores.

Play long enough and you’ll discover your first innovations the seedlings aren’t really your units, but rather the asteroids. Trading seedlings between asteroids balances offense and defense just as much as building the trees does. The final wrinkle is flowers, which seem to grow randomly on Dyson trees, which can attach to a tree and either enhance the seedlings growing from it or cultivate a powerful but slothful seedling destroying laser mine.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the arsenal at your disposal. The game is deceptively simple, but encourages out-of-the-box strategizing. Low on seedlings and need to cultivate? Set up a “trap planet” full of defense trees in the middle of your enemies’ flight paths. Or send one of your defense mines to thin out enemy seedlings. The “aha!” moments are great.

Unfortunately, the campaign’s 25 missions are really all there is to the game. There is a good deal of replay value with some unlockable skirmish maps, a higher difficulty setting, and some randomization in the regular campaign missions. There is an option on the main menu for “custom maps,” but I couldn’t find a level editor.

What the game is really missing is multiplayer. The game is so perfectly set up for it, and it feels like there’s a gaping hole in the experience. The developers say they didn’t put it in because they didn’t have much experience with multiplayer. It’s understandable that indie developers don’t exactly have the resources to maintain multiplayer servers, but to not include a game feature because you didn’t have the guts is inexcusable.

That’s not to say the main game doesn’t make this worth a purchase. The campaign consistently throws new and interesting challenges; one mission tasks players with protecting a planet-full of the diseased seedlings for ten minutes while the mysterious narrator studies them. Another starts the player on a lone asteroid surrounded by enemies that immediately attack, forcing the player to flee and regroup to take over the map. The pacing is a little slow, though. Occasionally you’ll find yourself sitting for as much as ten minutes just watching your trees sprout seedlings. Even speedier seedlings crawl across your screen slower than molasses.

The game’s graphics are painfully dull, consisting mostly of gray circles with colored dots floating around them. Zooming in on a single asteroid shows off the detail of the trees and the seedlings (each with a unique look depending on the asteroid they sprouted from), but there’s no practical reason to get up close since there’s no micromanagement options. The music is nice and ambient, even if it gets a little old in some of the longer missions, and the melodious sound effects blend nicely with it.

Even if it’s missing a few features, Eufloria has a level of depth and polish rarely seen in low-budget games. This game is great, and hopefully it’ll be the developer’s ticket to a high-budget game.