Auralux 2 and Microcosmum

Here is a pair of games from different developers, which I felt had rich graphics and completely different themes, so I installed them and took a shot at them ... but they turned out to be almost the same exact game.  In Auralux: Constellations (War Drum Games), you send streams of dots to capture planets, where in Microcosmum (Satur Entertainment) you send streams of antibodies to capture cells.

These are both graph-based hex capture puzzles.  Either one could be simulated in Warzone, except for the high style points they both get.  I sure lost the top one: about halfway through I scrolled out and saw there was a bigger green planet just off the bottom of the screen.  I ended up losing the bottom game also.  I was blue in both games, just another coincidence.

In Microcosmum, you get little icons of genetic code after each win, and you use those to power up your cells: antibody speed, armor strength, and such.  I only got through a few levels of each before I could not proceed.  I'm sure I will find a way, but my patience for failure is pretty limited these days.

I was surprised at how similar they were in look and feel.  So I could only compare the user interfaces.  In Microcosmum, the "joystick" area is a really awkward way to control where you are looking.  A few times, I ended up just zipping away from all the action and having to find a way back before I lost any more units.  In Auralux, it's a common two-finger scrolling, much easier to get the feel of.  Auralux had a crisp screen with multiple constellations where you can choose any level and it tells you the difficulty level, where Microcosmum appears to run you through a fixed series of levels with no choices.

As for strategy, after watching some videos of experienced players tackling levels on Auralux, it looks like it's always a matter of boxing all or most of your blips and picking one target.  Start by capturing one world and buffing it up, bring all units back to buff the original world, and you can stay ahead of the AI planets in development.  Wait for a neighbor to send a mass of units to a new world, and hit their source world with two or three planets worth of blips when they are at their weakest.  Interesting.

Each one is so intuitive, there isn't much that they need to say in a tutorial.  Just experiment and see what happens.

I would also classify them both as relaxing.  There's that sinking feeling when you pass the point of no return and know a loss is coming.  But you can view the population graph after a battle in Auralux to see that you really had no hope way earlier than you thought.  On the flipside, when you dominate a level, I always like to see the graph showing my color rising while everyone else trickles down to nothing.  (Insert evil laughter.)

I have to say that the store for Microcosmum is full of good ideas, all of them affordable.  There are options for randomly generated levels, paint-your-organism options, a "new life" option with 51 new levels and 5 bosses, hot and cold spots with new rules, aliens, more mutations ... all for $0.99 or $1.49.

I won one, lost two.  Overall, it's a bit self-defeating.  Not my favorite type of game.