GEON review (PS3)

I’m going to go ahead and describe Geon as ‘Battle Pacman Football’. Who would have thought it would be such a compelling combination? Now, you’re probably imagining the game to be some sort of pseudo collectable scavenging pitch based combat, and if you’re lucky, imaginative or crazy you may have hit the nail on the head. For the rest of us, here’s how it really works.

The game comprises a grid with pellets scattered over each space, normally (but not always) in a symmetrical pattern, with holes in the grid to navigate around. There’s a goal in the centre and you ‘play’ a brightly coloured cube that rolls around picking up pellets to charge a bar in the top left corner of the screen by running over them. Once you’ve charged the bar, you can head to the goal and if you do it before your opponent, cleverly positioned on the underside of the same grid, you’ll score a goal against him, hit pellets picked up since the last goal will be reset and it’ll start over again until one player has swiped all of his pellets, which will have netted him a total of five goals. Still with me?

Turn that thought upside down

The trouble is that your target goal is on the opponent’s side of the grid, so to score you’ll have to reach an edge, flip over it which flashes up a dramatic ‘Goal Run’ on your screen, and get to goal before he can stop you. If you see ‘Intruder’, you’ll know you’d better get on the defence immediately. You can move quicker by jumping across the grid and you’ll miss the pellets that you leap over, but you may reach your enemy in time and be able to stop him by either rolling into him and activating your shield or double jumping, which smashes down and makes a nearby opponent scatter a number of his collected pellets. This also works through the grid, so you can sabotage a player nearing his goal run with some clever foresight, assuming he doesn’t activate his ever recharging couple of seconds of shield.

As if that wasn’t enough, you can choose an emotion (read special ability) for your cube and it infuses powerballs that scatter your side with some kind of power up. Collect one and you’ll automatically be moving faster, but use it and it could help you grab pellets quicker by moving faster, sliding across the grid, sucking in nearby pellets or spawn a few extra cubes that will briefly roll around the area helping you out. If you’ve chosen a more aggressive emotion your ball could create a deadly electrified line for your enemy to avoid, hide your side of the grid from him allowing you to make a sneak attack, lay an invisible trap for him to fall into or cause a massive pellet-removing, slowing-down zone to appear around you depending on your emotion.

Winning strategy

Naturally, it is the strategy of the game that makes it entertaining, and there is a wide scope for how to beat your opponent. Why not flip over to his side just to steal a powerball and stop him from using it? Save your last pellet for somewhere close to the goal so that you can quickly flip over and score before your opponent can stop you, and when certain combinations of powerballs make skills more useful it becomes a more tactical game even when just choosing your emotion.

Geon does have its flaws however, naturally the hyper speed cube is meant to make it harder to control, but I find it strange that the jump button is the same as the ‘flip over the grid button’ just because they are both essentially jumps. The trouble is that you have to push towards the side and hit jump to cross over, and it’s all too easy to accidentally jump in the wrong direction, waste valuable seconds and confuse yourself a little too much to recover gracefully. A separate button would have helped to combat that, in my opinion, though of course the design decision may have been made to simplify controls.

Too many options!

Okay, it’s a little overly critical to complain about having too much stuff, which Geon doesn’t, but it does throw you in the deep end pretty quickly without much knowledge of what the emotions do, and while there is a tutorial for the basics it will take you a little time before you even stand a chance against an experienced player online. These modes are however well designed and add a human to human competitiveness that you can easily miss and become complacent (or disheartened on the other end of the scale) with the AI.

Actually, including split screen as well as online four player multiplayer modes does show the developer really wants you to be able to experience the game in any way you like (and is quite useful since it seems quiet online at the moment) There’s a standard dual, four way last man standing and even a 2 vs 2 team mode where you work together to charge your bar and make it to the goal.

I don’t like competing

Then we have a mode (or two) for you. Slap bang in the single player menu is the time attack mode that gives you four sets of eight rather more extravagant designs for grids and rather than giving you an opponent to beat it (unsurprisingly) lets you score those goals your own way but timed, netting you a gold, silver or bronze medal depending on how long you clocked up. Finishing each of the four sets with any rating then unlocks one of the eight mini games, while the remaining four are gained by scoring bronze or higher on each tier.

Maybe it’s just me, but these minigames are rather challenging. Essentially they’re just a case of collect every pill and reach the exit, but they include many more moving parts than other levels, buttons to shift areas around and blocks charging away in their set pattern that you do not want to get in the way of. Against time again, I don’t think I managed to complete any of them on my first attempt.

Leagues ahead?

Perhaps the most single player focussed is the League mode (added to this PSN version) which essentially puts you in four eight player leagues and promotes/relegates you depending on your position once you’ve played each of the others in that league. With gradually increasing difficulty, it’s a good way to get started, and, like all of the other modes has trophies attached to it, with a few good requirements that will squeeze every drop of goodness from the game if you’re motivated by such things (I am).

Sure, it’s probably not going to win any awards, but Geon remains a fun and replayable crazy action puzzle sport pacman hybrid. For a fiver, it’ll give you way more than just a weekend of entertainment, but probably in short blasts over the course of a long period of time. Now will someone get online so that I can get that 50 online wins trophy?