Classic, 2D FUN (Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved)

Member Name: robster113

Product:	Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
Date:	04/10/06 (158 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, colourful, fun, addictive

Disadvantages: too addictive, quite hard first few times playing which may discourage some

This game is available for purchase via xbox live arcade and cost 400 microsoft points which is equivalent to £3.40 and i must say that it is one of the best buys i have made. I have played it almost as much as some of my £50 proper games.

Some of you may have played some version of geometry wars before but this is a vast improvement

INTRO

You are some blob type thing (forgive my descriptions) which can shoot little yellow bullets. Your enemies are shapes whether it be rectangular, circular, square or some other weird thing. You must try and kill all the shapes and stuff to earn points and if you get touched by one of these then you die. The shapes will not shoot at you but some can go quite fast and later on in the game there will be a h*** of a lot of them.

GAME

The controls for this game are very simple. You move with the left stick, you shoot by pointing the right analogue stick in the direction you want to shoot and a stream of bullets will come out. There is no limit on your normal bullets. Pressing the left trigger or right trigger releases a bomb which will wipe out all the enemies on the board but you will not get any points for using it

The game starts with you in the centre of a board a bit bigger than the screen size. At first there will be few, easy enemies. You will get 50 points for killing these. After you kill 50 enemies you get a 2x multiplier so all kills are worth twice as much. Then when you get about 200 kills you get 3x multiplier. This goes on (not sure about the exact kill numbers) until 10x multiplier. You're multiplier will reset back to 1x whenever you die.

The game will slowly get harder with more enemies coming out of nowhere and now some will actually start to follow you and you will need to move quite quickly. When you reach 10,000 points your gun will change either to 5 shot bursts or very rapid 3 bullet shots. The gun will change to one or the other at random number of points.

You start with 3 lives and 3 bombs. You will gain another life every 75,000 points you get (max of 9 lives at any one time) and you will gain another bomb at every 100,000 points (also max of 9).

Once you get to about 15,000 points these "black hole" circles will appear. If you shoot one it will start sucking stuff in but it is not very strong so its not hard to avoid getting sucked into BUT if too many enemies get sucked into it then it will explode, releasing quite a few little blue circles which come racing at you (you can easily avoid them by doing lots of turns). However you can destroy black holes simply by shooting them quite a lot.

As you can see by the screenshot on dooyoo (the one next to where it says geometry wars and gives a small desciption), the game will get quite hectic but if you like a challenge don't worry. That picture does not show anywhere near what it can be like at almost 1,000,000 points. There will be massive amount of shapes following you but there is no time to kill them because you are carefully creating a path for yourself to get through without dying.

This game is a lot of fun but takes a while to get into it. It is much more fun once you work out little strategies for killing certain shapes or groups of shapes.

For those who have 360's and want to know what achievements there are:

The achievements in this game are quite hard. As you may know arcade games can give out a maximum of 200 gamer points. There are a few easy achievements but it will definitely take some skill to get some of them. The achievements are mostly to do with points. There is one for achieving 100,000 points, one for 250,000, one for 500,000 and one for 1,000,000 and then there are achievements for getting to each of those levels of points without dying. This takes up most of the achievements. There are however four more. There is one for having 9 lives at any one time, one for having 9 bombs at any one time, one for achieving a x10 multiplier and my favourite: One for surviving the first 60 seconds without firing. This last one takes a bit of skillful dodging and some practice but is fun.

Oh did i forget to mention that every shape you kill explodes with a small firework so your screen and get nice and colourful :-)

by the way all the above info may not be totally accurate as i am just speaking from my own experience (although that it quite a lot)

Summary: A great value, extremely fun xbox live arcade game