Geometry Wars on the Xbox.
Ah Geometry Wars… for those who aren’t aware, the original game in the franchise was released for the Xbox and buried away deep within Project Gotham Racing 2 (that’s why there isn’t a “pack shot” on this review) where players wandering around the in-game garage were rewarded for their adventurous spirit by finding a coin-op against one of the walls. The irony of course is that despite being from an A list developer and published by Microsoft themselves, Geometry Wars is pretty much an indie game that was originally thrown together by programmer Stephen Cakebread as a fun way to test some new joypad code – it proved so popular around the Bizarre Creations offices that they decided to make it available to the games playing public and from that decision something of a twin stick shooting, vectorised monster was born!
The player has a little spaceship and must blow the hell out of anything else that gets in the way of their guns. Simple stuff to describe yes, but incredibly hard to achieve with any level of success because the various enemy types are pretty hard to take down; each geometrical assailant has a distinct method of attack and some require more attention than others, black holes try to suck everything around them in including the player, crossed purple squares split into smaller and faster moving versions of themselves, cyan diamonds chase the player around the screen and so forth. When things get too hectic (and they’re going to start doing that extremely rapidly) there’s a limited stock of smart bombs available to clear the screen and avert death.
It tastes all wriggly.
Okay, so it’s nowhere near the original IP that Bizarre Creations seem to believe (they sent out cease and desist emails regarding clones of the sequel Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved) and it’s fair to say that the action itself is inspired by Robotron: 2084 with the smart bomb installed from Defender, the graphical style by vector-based games such as Star Castle or Tempest and to be honest it’s more “retro inspired” than honest to goodness retro (since the twin stick controls are analog and the sheer amount of stuff moving around would make the average 8-bit grind to a halt) but it holds together well because it’s unpretentious, easy to pick up and generally good fun – in fact I’ll be totally honest here and admit that my purchase of a second hand Xbox was pretty much because I wanted to play this game and I’ve never regretted that decision.
My God, it's full of... particles!
The original Geometry Wars is an Xbox exclusive, to play it you’ll need Project Gotham Racing 2 – a second hand copy should set you back just a couple of pounds and the main game is also worth playing.
