Geometry Wars: Galaxies review (Wii)

You might remember a little game that came out for the XBox 360 on its Live Arcade service way back in the console’s early life. Well most of you might do, but if you are a Wii owner exclusively and have no previous experience with Geometry Wars - whether we’re talking about the 360 revamp or the arcade game hidden in Project Gotham racing on the original Xbox back in 2003 – then let me fill you in. The game operates on a very simple premise in which you, the spacecraft, have to destroy everything on screen before it crashes in you. Easy right? Wrong.

The whole genius behind Geometry Wars is that all of the baddies (think shapes) coming towards you have starkly different attack patterns and vary in speed and aggression. These features in turn bring with them a certain tactical element in which you must now pick and choose your targets wisely. On top of this, as you progress through the game the sheer number of enemies on screen literally becomes insane. You are armed with only a laser and a handful of smart bombs which of course annihilates everything on screen for a limited time but it only offers a slight respite in what is a very hectic experience indeed.

You do however, obtain extra lives and power-ups for your projectiles and you pick up the odd extra smart bomb too. This is all dependent on how long you can stay alive. The game rewards you for staying alive: hanging on in there. Increase the fire-rate and girth of your weapons obviously enables you take out a wider range of floating meanies all at once and as the smart bombs are best used rather sparingly having plenty in reserve will only serve to see you rack up the super high scores.

That’s about it really, that’s all you have to do – well, in the original anyway. The only other thing worth mentioning is that of the colour, the awesome, resonating colour. As the screen fills with hues of yellow, green brown, red and a myriad of other ones, the spectacle becomes a sight to behold and sometimes actually distracts you from what is going on around you. To help you on your way, Blizzard have made the control system rather easy, the left stick to guide you, and the multi-directional right stick to fire, and a trigger to use your smarts. Simple, basic but addictive as hell. So how does the Nintendo Wii version entitled Galaxies, improved on changed on this formula?

Well we can start where we left off, the control scheme. Using the Wii-mote and nunchuck works rather well to be honest. You aim your reticule with the Wii-mote, fire with B and use your smart bombs with Z. Ok, read ‘works rather well’ as relatively easy but nothing as intuitive and as natural as a normal controller, unfortunately. Well, Nintendo to the rescue: you can also use the classic controller which, as you might have guessed, works in exactly the same way as the XBox controller mentioned in the aforementioned paragraph. Only doing this feels rather cheap. I mean, it helps you play the game so much more accurately and freely that there is no point going back to the Wii-mote. However, if you don’t own a Classic Controller, then I suppose ignorance is bliss, but for me, Wii games are all about the Wii-mote, so I find it rather disappointing that the difference is so marked that anyone who owns both won’t bother with it once they’ve tried ‘stick’.

Another difference is that Galaxies offers you sixty different areas to complete. Geo Wars Retro Evolved was just one long game with varying degrees of enemies pace and behaviour and you just had to hold on for as long as you can. Galaxies, gives you the same set-up, but now you play in a window instead of filling up the screen and you watch as your attackers circle the perimeter before bursting through and basically making a nuisance of themselves. The differing levels offer weirdly shaped windows that you have to play in and the number of enemies compared to Retro Evolved has been added to a great deal.

Galaxies also offers you some fun two player multiplayer action as you and a friend can endure much hilarity as one of control the spaceship and the other controls where and when the enemies enter you safe zone and really try and mess with your brain. This is actually quite fun and if you have any friends close by then you should definitely get them in on the action.

To sum up, Geo Wars offers you the same, basic and fun gameplay but with the added twist of a level structure. However, it really is all about shooting and avoiding getting shot. After a few hours play I found I was just stuck in the same groove and the game doesn’t offer much in the way of variety. That’s all fine when I played it on the 360 as the game cost the same as a pint and a packet of crisps but paying over £20 for it, although at a budget price, I found the new features don’t really add too much to the game. It could have saved itself a minus point if the Wii-mote implementation would have made the game more enjoyable, but as the Classic Controller offers so much more precision and therefore fun, I might as well be playing on the 360. Shame really. Still, if you haven’t played the game before, then for around twenty pounds you can’t really go too wrong.