Frantic, Flashing Lights - A Review of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
Retro evolved is a fitting tagline to the sequel of Bizarre Creation’s arcade hit. The game takes the fast, frantic shooting of old-school arcade games and force evolves it for today’s audiences through the medium of the Xbox Live Arcade. Screw character, plot and narrative, Geometry Wars 2 is a game that gets to the point. There’s only one goal: score points. You collect points in their millions, points across several game modes and more points than your friends points. There’s no compulsion or motivation except the unabashed hording of points.
You play the role of a small piece of Geometry warring against an array of other geometry. Why such unrest exists is never explained. I can only imagine that the different colours of the shapes are symbolic of racial prejudice in modern society...or some such like that. It’s the closest we’ll get to a story in the game, so we’ll role with that for now.
Your enemies include the docile purple double-square thing, the predictable orange arrow fellow, and the pesky purple shape that stalks you- amongst many about a dozen other varieties. You move with the left stick, and hold the right analogue in any direction to fire a constant stream of bullets to dispatch the enemy shapes. In some modes you’re given the luxury of a screen-clearing bomb. Every shape you destroy drops a tiny green crystal - a geom - and these build your multiplier, ensuring that in the latter minutes of any game your score is bounding up millions at a time.
A typical round of Geometry Wars 2 is like having a rainbow make passionate love to your eye-sockets.
The gameplay is simple and intuitive enough to get to grips with straight away, but each of the modes will rapidly descend into chaos, panic, death and then almost always another go. The average game of Geometry Wars last no more than two minutes unless you’re doing particularly well. This pushes a ‘just one more go’ mentality, and it won’t be uncommon to sink an hour of time just trying to top your last high-score.
The game is divided into 6 modes. Deadline is 3 minutes of point-hording with unlimited lives and a handful of bombs. King limits your firing ability to within the confines of slowly depleting circles. Evolution is a mode that scales sharply in difficulty and rewards you with added lives and bombs as you gain more points. Pacifism is a mode where the only way to dispatch enemies is to move through rotating gates. Waves sees you pitted against wave after wave of straight-moving enemies, and the boss level - Sequence - is a marathon of 20 individual challenges. Each mode provides a different sort of experience, but the frantic arcade action is always present and always perfect.
Sequence demands skilful shooting, but also has puzzle-esque aspect to it. You have to figure out how to beat each level.
Perhaps the games most striking features is its visuals. Everything is rendered in bright, vivid neon. If you try your best to think of a firework vomiting after a night drinking sticky cocktails with a meal of neon paint afterwards you wouldn’t be far off...but visualisation of that sort probably can’t be attainted without somehow breaking the law. When the screen is packed with shapes which are respawning as fast as you can shoot them down, you can’t help but admire the spectacle.
There’s music to match as well. Every different mode has its own backing track - electronic mixes that compliment the visuals well but never become annoying or imposing enough to distract from the shooting. If there’s anything negative to be said about the presentation at all it’s that the menus are bland.
While it may not be a significant part of the game - or any game -by any stretch, the achievements deserve a mention. There’s one for unlocking all the modes, and one for beating the boss level, but every other remaining one is a wonderfully pitched mode-specific challenge that puts you off the normal goal of point-scoring. The challenge is placed perfectly to ensure difficulty but not frustration. It’s very rare that unlocking gamerscore on Xbox Live feels like an accomplishment, but the ones here are both a challenge and a joy to attain.
There’s not much to say. Geometry Wars 2 is an uncomplicated, frenetic arcade shooter presented immaculately. There’s not much to the game, but what it has is perfectly done. Unlocking modes will take no time at all, but inching up your high scores and taking down the mighty sequence mode will keep you playing on and off for months.
Visuals: Fantastic and unique neon visuals give you something to wonder at while the action happens. 5/5
Sound: Compliments the visuals well, but is never distracting or annoying. Sound-effects are appropriate. 4/5
Gameplay: Perfect arcade shooting. It’ll have you going back to beat your high scores over and over again. 5/5
Overall: About 95/100 ... this isn't an exact science incase you hadn't noticed.
