Out on the show floor at this year’s E3, the Microsoft displays rotated between a few of their new Xbox Live Arcade titles. When Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 was made available to play, the colorful, frantic graphics drew me in, and when the controller got into my hands, I was hooked. I was able to spend a few rounds blasting away at Bizarre Creations’ new shooter, and I hope you’ll join us for our impressions after the jump. I promise you don’t have to do any actual math.
Though the simple gameplay and frantic pace have been retained from the original title, everything about Geometry Wars 2 seems to have gotten bigger and more involving. The play field is larger, the explosions and effects are more colorful and dazzling, the enemies come in more varieties, with prettier animations and larger groups, and the scores are much, much, much higher. My top score at Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is a respectable 2.27 million, but I more than doubled that score in the sequel, in roughly a tenth of the time.
The scoring mechanic is the most dramatic change about the basic game. In the previous game, mowing down swarms of hostile shapes would see your scoring multiplier slowly climb, allowing you to rack up more and more points, until you lost a ship and the multiplier would reset to 1. This was an increasingly difficult task; reaching a x10 multiplier is an achievement I still don’t have. In the new game, however, your multiplier climbs at an unbelievable pace: Every enemy killed leaves behind a few little green collectibles, each of which raises your multiplier by one when acquired. Furthermore, your multiplier doesn’t reset or drop when you are killed. Soon, you’ve raised it by hundreds, if not thousands, and a swarm of ten-point enemies is suddenly worth a quarter-million. This also affects the use of bombs — whereas before, a well-placed bomb was a last-ditch measure to survive a bit longer to keep your multiplier up, now, using a bomb (while still not awarding any points) will leave behind a sea of little green pick-ups if used when the screen is especially full of enemies.
Toss in some new enemies and take out the ability to get a better gun, and you’ve got a significantly different experience for the main game. This game, however, is merely one of six: Named “Evolved,” it is a mode which stands alongside “King,” “Sequence,” “Deadline,” “Waves,” and “Pacifism.” I wasn’t able to sample them all, but each of the ones I did try turned the game into a wholly different experience. “Deadline” provided me with infinite lives, but also with a three-minute time limit, turning each death into several wasted seconds of potential scoring. “Sequence” pitted me against a few tricks at a time, spawning a few waves of enemies in what looked like pre-set patterns before providing a short break, giving the game the appearance of stages/levels.
All of these game alterations, of course, pale in comparison to the changes brought on by GW2’s new multiplayer modes. Supporting up to four players on-screen at once, each of the game’s six rulesets can be played in either versus or cooperative mode. The co-op modes make things rather frantic, as there are more enemies and a great deal more for your poor eyes to keep track of, but the mechanic doesn’t change much — all players share the same score and multiplier, though they also share the same pool of extra lives. Where the game gets truly diabolical is in versus mode, where a dead opponent is a chance to shoot ahead in score, and where a series of powerups begins to make things downright insane. Collecting a flashing star will do any number of things to help you and/or hinder your opponents; perhaps you’ll get an improved weapon or limited invincibility, or perhaps you’ll freeze the other player(s) in place for a few moments. Both shoot-em-up fans and party game fans will want to keep an eye on this one.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is scheduled to launch for Xbox Live Arcade on August 6th.
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July 24th, 2008 at 9:37 am
[...] next week, on July 30th. We’re quite eager to play the full version of this game, based on the fun we had with it during E3 last week. It’s excellent that we’ll now get to do so a full week earlier [...]
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