It’s not that often that I review an Xbox Live arcade game; but under the circumstances I'm making an exception. Found residing in Bizarre Creations Project Gotham Racing series, Geometry wars was a side project that was hidden in-game as an innocent looking arcade machine for the many players to find.
It’s now made the leap onto Xbox Live arcade as a standalone game, but does this ‘retro evolution’ amount to the game being sold by it self?
The aim of the game is simple, you control a ship that navigates around a grid, and you have to survive by dodging enemies and shooting them. The left thumb-stick takes precedence for the ship’s movements, and the right thumb-stick controls the direction of your weapon. This is very much a minimalist game play style and within the preconceptions of this genre, it feels very natural to play, giving the player fluent and responsive control over the ship. This makes it almost immediate to gain an understanding of, so the learning curve is sort of eradicated.
So you pick it up quickly, you take out your first small waves of enemies; how does Bizarre expand on this? Well in the only way they can, by chucking so many more enemies at you. You could get up to 100 enemies in the grid with you at any one time. It’s these sections that give you such a feeling of being the underdog; being oppressed by so many enemies in such a claustrophobic area. But contrary to where games that do this fail, the game still feels fair. When you fail, you can see why, and you don’t feel like you’ve been cheated when you do.
This is where Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved succeeds considerably.
The presentation of this game follows the same ‘minimalist but expanded’ approach as the game play does. Aesthetically, from the outset, the game is quite simple. Your ship and enemies are simple line constructions, and your area of play is an uncomplicated grid structure. However, it is the alarmingly bright animations that make this game look extremely attractive. The only way I could relate this to other games in comparison is to think of FantaVision for PS2 mixed with asteroids; that is the visual style of Geometry wars: Retro evolved. Enemies explode like multi-coloured fireworks, which makes facing fifty enemies in one wave look extremely over-the-top. Even the grid that you battle on is interactive; rippling as you drive and shoot over it, creating shockwaves as ships explode, and imploding whenever a vortex is created. This may only be the graphics, and they don’t lend at all to game play mechanics, but it creates an amazing atmosphere.
This is also accentuated by the sound design of the game. The sound effects are of the standard, futuristic shooter variety, but work well within the context of the Geometry Wars ‘vibe.’ The soundtrack is also a generic techno/rave song, with pumping bass and high register melodies, but again it fits in to the feeling created when you play Geometry Wars.
All of the above creates such a blast to the senses that you feel invigorated after playing a round of Geometry Wars. However, this is all you can do; nothing else is implemented. Bizarre Creations have added so much detail into the only game mode of Geometry Wars, but the actual variety out of this isn’t explored at all. There are online leader boards, which give a limited amount of competition, but the developer had the best online platform to exploit with some online multiplayer, and they didn’t take the opportunity.
So, how would you rate a game like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved? On one hand, it wholly perfects one game mode and it blows any 2D shooter of it's kind out of the water; but I feel that there is a huge void where online co-op or vs. should have been. I know it’s implemented into Galaxies for the Wii, but an online mode for Retro Evolved would’ve been extremely addictive. On the other hand, it’s only 800 ms points which is approximately 5 pounds and for what you get, it is remarkable value for money.
Atmospherically speaking, Geometry Wars is the Xbox Live Arcade equivalent of an illegal outdoor rave. It’s vigorous, fast paced and you’d be foolish to leave half way through. So come, push the senses, and test yourself with Geometry Wars.
Share
0 comments:
Post a Comment