TIMEsink REVIEW: Agar.io

A great many games start out their lives as tiny little projects released onto image boards which, by their nature, tend to include lots of interested people who play the hell out of the games and give constructive feedback (plus some not-so-constructive feedback). Often, these games peter out due to lack of developer interest - but when a developer sticks to their guns, they can put enough effort into their creation to polish it for general release, cut all ties with the imageboards that helped them and pretend that they were never involved.

Agar.io is one such game, and despite a small amount of bitterness at being abandoned, the players are still avid. It's a game where you play as a single cell, in a space full of little pellets of food, viruses, and other players' cells; eating food makes you larger, and if there's a significant difference in size between players when they pass over each other, the smaller player will get eaten, their mass added to the victor. It gets a little bit more tactical when you discover that you can eject a little bit of mass to act as bait/bribes to other players, and you can even fling half your mass forward in an attempt to eat an opponent, which leaves you as a pair (or array, if you foolishly keep splitting) of faster-moving, but more edible cells - and the viruses around the map protect the smaller cells, but burst larger cells into vulnerable mass arrays themselves.

It can result in a great deal of frustration when you're herded into a corner of the map by a group of cells that have decided to work together, and wondrous elation when you finally reach the top of the scoreboard and float like a whale through a sea of panicking little fishes... at least, until your mass degrades or someone manages to split a virus in your direction by throwing enough mass at it.

Our Timesink Rating: 4. You'll find yourself coming back to it, even after you ragequit.

Click here to play Agar.io.