Here are some important facts about Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. It is developed by Bizarre Creations, the team that created its predecessor in late 2005. It is currently available exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade, taking up just over 40MB of hard drive space and costing 800 Microsoft Points ($10). It is a Robotron-style shoot-em-up, utilizing dual-stick analog controls for movement and shooting in independent directions. It features six gameplay modes, available as both single-player and 4-player offline games. Finally, and most importantly, it is an intensely fun and enjoyable game which you really ought to buy if you have even the slightest affinity for “shmups.”
To be fair, it was probably a foregone conclusion that I would enjoy Geometry Wars 2, given how much time I spent with its last XBLA incarnation. It’s therefore entirely obvious that fans of the original will enjoy the sequel, given how many elements have been carried over, but this demands a new question of such a review. Geometry Wars 2 is a fantastic game when viewed in a vacuum, for reasons I’ll get to in a while, but when measuring a sequel — particularly in a game without any story, or characters, and whose gameplay is largely the same as the last game — one must also measure the added value for owners of the preceding title. Is there enough here to warrant a purchase, or will gamers be shelling out their points/money for the same game twice? The answer is an emphatic “yes” to the former: Geometry Wars 2 may look and play similarly to the original, but once you get into it, the experience is incredibly different from a score-hungry, strategic point of view.
In a shmup without any level architecture, story, power-up selections, or end goal, the only possible measure of success is one’s score. The game relies on the oldest hallmark of classic arcade gaming: Play ’til you lose. If you’re good enough, you can be that legendary denizen of the game, the guy who could play forever on one quarter, whose initials and unbreakable score would forever be burned into the top of the monitor. Granted, nowadays one’s initials are replaced by a Gamertag, and the monitor burn-in is an online leaderboard, but the sentiment remains: Geometry Wars is a game about fighting for higher and higher numbers. As much fun as the last game was, for those of us who are competitive about these things, the high scores were rather underutilized; the game would merely display the highest score achieved since the last time it had been loaded. If you wanted a look at your all-time best, you had to visit the leaderboards. Comparatively, the first thing I noticed about Geometry Wars 2 was the presence of in-game leaderboards, which brought a broad smile to my face. When you start up the game’s single-player modes, you are immediately greeted with up-to-date leaderboards for each of the game’s six modes, populated by the names on your Xbox LIVE friends list. I enjoyed quite a rivalry with my friends over the original Geometry Wars, so this feature is perfectly suited for an improved experience; every time I start the game, I can now track my friends’ scores at a glance, and if someone has beaten me at a particular mode, I know which one I’ll be playing that day.
Conversely, the first thing I noticed about Geometry Wars 2 that worried me was the utilization of locked content. Allowing/forcing players to unlock content in a game can be quite fun if used properly, providing replay value and an extra sense of achievement, but done poorly, it’s a blatantly artificial means of providing illusory advancements in a game, often times locking up basic essentials like vital interface options. So, when I started the game and found that five of the game’s six advertised gameplay modes were locked, I became concerned. However, my fears proved to be needless; each game mode becomes unlocked when you have played the one preceding it for an adequate amount of time (typically 3-4 games each). I unlocked everything the game had to offer in roughly half an hour, and in doing so, I found myself now familiarized with the various rules and methods of each type. This is a refreshingly clever move on Bizarre Creations’ part: through a briefly forced repetition of each mode, the player creates his own trial-and-error tutorial.
The first game mode which Geometry Wars 2 gives you is called Deadline, which takes the time-based trial version of Geometry Wars and turns it into an entirely whole experience. In Deadline, you are thrown into the game’s typical gun-and-bomb survival routine, but strictly limited on time: You have infinite lives at your disposal, but the game will end after 3 minutes. It’s a great way to experience the new game in controlled bursts; no matter how terribly or incredibly you’re doing, the game lasts the same 180 seconds, every time. In addition, you can even play Deadline in its entirety for free — folks who pick up the trial version of Geometry Wars 2 get to play the full version of Deadline, and it’s worth the download just to get a taste of the rest of the game.
One would think this mode would allow amateur players to recklessly die over and over again and still rack up huge scores, but if anything, Deadline makes prolonged survival that much more crucial to success — though losing a life will only cost you a few lost seconds of available scoring time, each time you die, the pace at which enemies appear is drastically reduced, which means you’ll be wasting valuable time on easy foes while you wait for the opportunity to really start raking in the points. This also makes your screen-clearing bombs that much more valuable — they provide you with the necessary respite from your foes without dampening your rate of progress, and they also fill the screen with Geometry Wars 2’s biggest change of all: Geoms.
Geoms are tiny green shapes that are left behind when an enemy is destroyed. Picking them up with your ship will increase your score multiplier, a bonus that had previously been attained by killing a sufficient number of enemies. Furthermore, your multiplier no longer resets to x1 when you are killed; over the course of a game, it’s not uncommon for your multiplier to start reaching rates of x500 or x1,000. The first time I saw this, I had assumed this was merely a shift in the scoring system — a way to let scores grow exponentially higher, and let everyone reach those ego-boosting multimillion numbers. After having played for a significant amount of time, however, I’ve realized that Geoms have singlehandedly changed the way one must play in order to really rake in the points. In Geometry Wars, keeping one’s multiplier up and one’s score high was a matter of survival. If you kept shooting the enemies and passively building your multiplier, eventually you would be pulling in massive points. As such, a perfectly viable strategy was to pull the growing horde around the screen, firing behind you as you led enemies on a merry chase. Geoms, on the other hand, appear on the screen where your enemies fall, and don’t last very long. If you want to collect them — and you do want to collect them — every so often, you’re going to have to double back towards the horde, or you’re going to have to charge your enemies headlong. With the simple addition of a pick-up element, fighting for a high score in Geometry Wars 2 is a whole new animal.
With a few games of Deadline under your belt, Geometry Wars 2 unlocks the next mode, “King.” In King, you have only one life, and no bombs, and you can’t shoot most of the time, making it a frantically defensive game. The twist in King is that the screen is populated by a number of circular zones, which enemies cannot penetrate, and which allow you to shoot while you are inside them. However, the moment you enter a zone, it begins to decay, giving you only a few precious seconds before the circle shrinks and vanishes, leaving you unarmed and vulnerable, meaning you need to head quickly to a new zone, grabbing as many Geoms (which mercifully last much longer in this mode) as you can on the way. Prolonged survival is a matter of reaching a zone, quickly figuring out which one to go to next, and blasting a path there before making the dash. Being caught outside of a zone when new enemies spawn is deeply unfortunate.
It was while playing King that I realized how much has been done with the music in Geometry Wars 2. The arcade-techno tune of the original is back in remixed form, along with new tracks for each game mode, but the game also uses the music dynamically to reflect in-game events, providing very clever audio cues as to what’s happening. In King, the music changes when you’re in or out of a zone — thumping beats drive you on when you’re in the blast-happy safety of a zone, but the music goes percussion-free when you leave, making the tune take on a haunting feel to reflect your immediate danger. The music also changes, on the fly, in the other game modes if you die, use a bomb, if a black hole collapses, and more.
Playing King for a while will unlock “Evolved,” which is as similar as Geometry Wars 2 gets to its predecessor. Three bombs, three lives, and whatever moves you’ve got against a neverending horde of enemies, with only the occasional score-granted extra bomb & life to comfort you. It plays just as the original game did, albeit with the Geoms and a collection of new enemies, including the rockets from Geometry Wars: Waves, immobile magenta square-things, reflective gates, and other polygonal miscreants.
Evolved eventually gives way to the fourth mode, “Pacifism,” which is possibly the hardest of them all: One life, no bombs, and no shooting at all. Thankfully, the only enemies present (at least, in the patheticly short games I managed) are the blue diamonds, which home in on your position while moving relatively slow, but this becomes a moot point when there’s, like, a zillion of them. You can only destroy enemies through the new “gate” obstacles, which will cause a very small explosion if you pass through them — but will kill you if you touch the sides. Butterfingers! This mode, too, is crawling with long-lasting Geoms, which is nice, since going back towards your foes with no guns isn’t the best idea ever.
From there, you’ll unlock “Waves,” which is simply an adaptation of the earlier Geometry Wars: Waves minigame which appeared in Project Gotham Racing 4. Constant “waves” of rockets will swarm in from the edges of the screen, zipping back and forth in straight lines until there’s too many on-screen to deal with. Like other modes, you get one life, and lots of Geoms.
Finally, you will receive “Sequence” mode, which, despite offering Geometry Wars to you in quick, 30-second bursts of pre-set patterened spawns, is absolutely manic. Each level in the sequence consists of hundreds of enemies at a time, often in bafflingly difficult formations. How would you like to be surrounded by rockets on all sides? Maybe you’d like to deal with 40 black holes at once? Hey, how about 300 of the really fast homing enemies that split into smaller enemies when shot? Sequence is like if WarioWare was a shmup. It is absolute split-second-reaction and overwhelming gameplay lunacy with the occasional chance to breathe, and it is wonderful.
Then, there’s the multiplayer. Sweet, marvelous, screaming-in-hilarious-panic multiplayer. Each of the game’s aforementioned six modes can be played with up to four players, in either cooperative or competitive play, and it adds both the joy of social gaming and wholly new strategies to each one. In every cooperative mode, the players share everything — a score, a multiplier, and a pool of lives. Co-op King can become a game of blasting around your fellow players while they greedily collect Geoms, while co-op Waves can put you back-to-back with the others, huddling for safety while each man handles the enemies spawning from one direction.
The competitive modes even go so far as to sprinkle power-ups into the mix — collecting a floating star can temporarily beef up your weapon, or attract all on-screen Geoms to your ship, or freeze your opponents in place. Players can’t shoot eachother, but the mad scramble for Geoms and points is plenty of fun, with quick on-screen prompts signalling who has taken the lead. Also, since the game is solely based on score, if the player in the lead loses all lives before the others, the game turns into a “bottom of the ninth” bid for survival for the remaining players, who need only exceed the top score in order to emerge victorious.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is a masterpiece of twitchy arcade madness. The controls are still dead-on, the gameplay is twice as frantic, and there’s enough game modes for competitive shmup fans to stay at eachother’s throats for hours on end. I fully recommend an immediate purchase.
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