Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 Review
As many Xbox 360 gamers will recall back in 2005 the Project Gotham 2 Racing minigame Geometry Wars was revived and brought into the modern age on the Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. The game was one of the best received Xbox Live Arcade games the console has known and many a fan spent hour after hour of addictive game time on it. Now Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 has hit the arcade bit how much does the sequel improve on the simple but addictive original? Well it turns out a whole lot.
If you're unfamiliar with the gameplay of Geometry Wars it basically involves you using the left stick to steer your ship around a 2D arena while using the right stick of direct your fire. The thing that separates Geometry Wars apart from any similar stick shooter is that it spawns ridiculous numbers of easy enemies in a small space leading to maximum insanity. Retro Evolved 2 keeps all the elements that made its predecessor brilliant but introduces new potentially minor aspects which completely change the game.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 features 6 different game modes: Deadline, King, Evolved, Pacifism, Waves and Sequence. In Deadline you must score as many points as possible in 3 minutes with unlimited lives, in King you spend your time jumping between shrinking circles which are the only areas you can fire from and keep out enemies, Evolved is the traditional gameplay type, in Pacifism you must pass through exploding gates to destroy enemies, in Waves waves of enemies will spawn, sweeping across the screen from all directions and Sequence features a linear progression of 20 levels in which all enemies must be cleared within a time limit with a limited number of overall lives. All the modes are original (save of course Evolved), very fun and each very individual and the 5 new modes add much more play time and should offer at least 1 mode that you absolutely love. When you start the game however, only deadline is unlocked and you must unlock further modes by scoring a certain total number of points meaning that you not only experience every mode when you first play, but you also get a sufficient amount of practice in each mode so you are at least somewhat sufficient.
Another new addition to the world of Geometry Wars is geoms. When you destroy an enemy these small green pieces will stay on the screen for a limited time and each one you collect increases your multiplier by 1. This completely changes scoring because you can start a game with a x1 multiplier and very easily work your way up to a x300 multiplier. The gradual progression of scoring very small to very large amounts of points per enemy makes scoring feel absolutely crazy and makes times at which you are surrounded by vast numbers of enemies even more maniacal. It also gives you a real sense of brilliant to collect a large number geoms at once and better separates out scores on leaderboards.
Retro Evolved 2 features offline multiplayer for up to 4 players. You can either play versus or co-op in any one of the 6 modes and each of the modes comes off pretty much as well in multiplayer as it does in single player. The versus multiplayer features power-ups not available in single player or co-op and these power-ups are all pretty simple but add a further element of chaos to the game without tipping the balance of scores too far. The co-pilot feature is probably one of the most difficult and innovative areas of co-op play; this feature allows one player to steer the ship in any game mode (except pacifism) while the other player fires, just like the rest of Geometry Wars its fun and easy to do but very tricky to master. Unfortunately Retro Evolved 2 does not feature an online multiplayer mode but with the ever-present lag online the slightest drop in connection quality may be the difference between winning and losing, considering the speed that the game is played at and the number of enemies on screen at any one time.
As far as difficulty goes the game like its forefathers always attempts to challenge you, often to the point of dragging you into seemigly near-impossible situations, but you will notice that the game spawns different numbers of enemies based roughly on how well you are doing so although the game always carries an air of slightly maddening difficulty it won't just beat newbies mercilessly into the ground and consider them done with.
The achievements are all pretty well made ranging from a number of general achievements to a selection of achievements based on specific modes. As with every game that has a good achievement structure Retro Evolved 2 gives you the chance to get a few achievements that are easier than others (although nothing really cheap) but getting them all takes a lot of training and patience. All the achievements are well thought out, give a well-deserved quantity of points and the achievements relating to specific modes do a good job of actually improving your skill in that specific mode.
The graphics for the original Retro Evolved were a fireworky display of beauty and Retro Evolved 2 manages to improve on that, making the experience more colourful. All the enemies have had more glow added, the new enemies add a further splash of colour to the game, the tail of your ship changes between a rainbow sequence of colours and the edge of the playing area now reflects colours. However the biggest new change in graphics is that destroying an enemy will result in a random coloured explosion being released and this and all the other small little changes have lead to an overall more crazy and graphically overwhelming look to the game (in a good way).
The music for the game is pretty much the same kind of techno-like, slightly strange kind of music that the first Retro Evolved gave a little taste of. There is the old menu theme and the old gameplay theme from the original Retro Evolved that have been re-recorded and they still sound good but every mode has its own theme and while you can't expect to find anything here that will blow you away each piece of music fits well as a background for its specific mode. The games sound effects can pretty much be fitted into two categories: explosions and spawning and the spawn sounds are all pretty distinctive so you have some idea of what is going on around you but none of the sounds are low quality or too intrusive.
In conclusion if you haven't played Geometry Wars before go get the original and then pick this up for the best experience, but if you are a hardened veteran of the war on Geometry get ready to fall in love with the game all over again. Despite the simplicity of the game, Bizzare have managed to reinvent it for the better and along with its predecessor can take its place as one of the best Xbox Live Arcade games ever.
