Exacerbated slightly by the structured appearance of tide-turning, temporary power-ups (with limited availability), getting caught in the wrong place at the wrong time on the wrong side of a planetoid can spell disaster for those not hardy enough to battle on through.īut what’s a loss in Geometry Wars anyway? By the time you start to explore the greater depths of weapon strategy, you’ll be so far down the instant-restart rabbit hole that you’ll have forgotten the defeat the instant you’re back blasting. And in the main game - as has always been the case - bad luck can on occasion screw you over. The addition of online multiplayer - taking in two different, team-based modes focused around competitive score-attack – adds little, lacking the purity of the main game and, at the time of writing, the player-count for anarchic fun. In a way, it actually increases competition rather than reducing it.ĭownsides? In a game this focused, this knowing of its core gameplay and values, there are few. Some might argue that custom gear reduces the purity of the score-chasing experience - particularly between friends - but at the same time it adds an extra degree of meta-challenge, as you puzzle upon the optimum set-up for each level once you’ve become intimately familiar with its quirks.
Although certain drones are always useful, the ‘best’ load-out remains situational, based on the unique tasks and challenges at hand. And in timed challenges set in tight, twisting arenas, it can clear a wave single-handed.Īll of this, again, refocuses the gameplay, this time by your own design. Sounds odd, but in certain levels, that temporary ‘safe-zone’ can be a game-changer. Homing missiles act as a great alternative to the smart bomb, cleaning the screen less efficiently, but preserving the points scored for enemies downed. Another hoovers up the geoms that feed your score multipliers. Appearing a few levels in, and unlocking progressively alongside campaign progress, these little robot buddies augment your ship with additional abilities, one passive, one activated manually, once per round. Appearing every 10 levels, not every boss is a high point, but at their best they present some of the most intense, exhilarating, conceptually and aesthetically stunning gameplay you’ll experience this year.Īnd then there are the drones.
Others will warp into unannounced proxy-bodies on different hemispheres of the arena - sometimes several at a time - forcing frantic seek-and-destroy tactics while juggling the omnipresent normals. Some will try to distract you with unfathomably dense waves of enemies and morphing, obstructive level architecture. No mere psychedelic bullet-sponges, GW3’s mega-mooks are - in the majority - intricate, arcane, multi-stage puzzle-boxes of intense, problem-solving combat. All of it is the most basic level on which Geometry Wars 3 operates. That shifting, central choke-point is a constant blessing and curse. A simple, circular arena becomes a cat-and-mouse seesaw of control, as two walls rotate around its rim like the blades inside a washing machine. The peaks of domed areas and the corners of cuboids can offer powerful, king-of-the-castle advantages if you can hold them, but are also incredibly high-risk areas due to their reduced visibility of the overall warzone. The spiralling playfulness of GW3’s level design changes everything. It’s an incredible, immensely gratifying feeling. Those always-troublesome rows of orange rockets are terrifying the first time their formation spreads to stretch around a spherical play area, but once you realise that, logically, they have to come back together at the other side? You can dodge, fire a salvo behind yourself at the opportune moment, and know – without even looking - that they’re not coming back around to bother you a second time. You’ll start to discover radically new, deeply satisfying sides to – and interactions with – the series’ traditional enemy AI types. You’ll find that a boss enemy’s bubble-shield isn’t actually an annoyance, but a strategic, environmental opportunity, its chaotic, 180-degree deflections bathing the grid with cleansing gunfire more effectively than you ever could on your own. Not long after, you’ll start to realise the true power and potency of GW’s new set-up. You’ll be giddily impressed the first time you fire a stream of shots to the other side of a gleaming, glitterball moon, or spin around on the corner of a cube, showering three sides of it with a rainstorm of glowing gunfire. This is precise 2D gameplay exploded to take in boggling, free-wheeling, 3D strategies.
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