Hamst3r's Quick Review
World of Goo
In short: World of Goo is fun, hilarious, clever and definitely worth it’s budget price, so please delay no further in adding this joyous slice of genius to your gaming collection!
Running right along side with Braid, World of Goo is much more than what it initially seems to be. While World of Goo starts off as a straight-forward puzzle game where you need to build a tower or a bridge out of cute balls of goo to reach the end of the level, the sheer cleverness and diversity of the subsequent scenarios is what make World of Goo so great.
Immediately after the first level, World of Goo will begin to introduce you to several new “species” of goo, which all have very unique properties. There is goo that can be reused multiple times, goo that catches on fire, goo that sticks to any surface, goo that floats like a balloon and so on. In general, the goo designs are good at visually and audibly explaining what each species of goo is going to do before you even put them to use.
World of Goo feels fresh the whole way through. Every level will throw some sort of new game mechanic at you. The levels are also really nice hand drawn environments with several background layers of parallax and some beautiful effects too. Not to mention, all of this is carried along by an endearing story with some genuinely funny humor, such as from the insane sign painter who leaves tons of bizarre messages all over the place.
For the more hardcore player, World of Goo has online leaderboards, Steam Achievements and “OCD Challenges” to keep you occupied after you complete the main game. Some of the OCD Challenges are pure evil, I tell ya! I haven’t checked out all of the OCD challenges yet, but the ones I have revolved around speed runs, limited moves and saving way more goo balls that seemingly possible.
Lastly, there’s also a Tower of Goo-esque mode in the game where you simply have to build as high as possible. The number of goo balls you have to build with is dictated by how many you’ve collected in the main story mode. The more levels you beat, the higher you can build your tower. It saves your tower building progress too, so you can work on it at your leisure. Another cool feature is that as you’re building your tower, clouds floating in the background will show you real-time info of other people’s tower building shenanigans.
Overall, World of Goo is the full package with great music, visual design and gameplay. I’ve played for about 8 hours so far and I plan on playing a lot more!
3 Comments