When I first saw Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on Xbox Live Arcade, I immediately knew I was going to be terrible at the game. So I didn’t play it for a long time. Then, I did. And I did do terribly for a while. But eventually I got pretty good, not a million points good, but my high score hovered around 900,000. I started spending hour after hour playing the game, figuring out the easiest way to kill each enemy, trying the “go in circles!” technique (clock-wise and counter clock-wise (I really don’t think it makes a difference)), trying to get the highest score possible. I would put on A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Midnight Marauders’ album and go to town for hours on end.

Next thing I know, E3 ’08 rolls around, and there’s finally news about Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. New game modes? Alright, could be cool. New weapons? I can dig. New enemies? Shit. The old ones were challenging enough! The four-man multiplayer looked attractive, but I felt like it could get too easy with four times the bullets.

So the day finally arrived. Went to the bank to make a deposit, then Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 was finally in my grasp. So after making the 800 Microsoft point, $10 real money fee, which aggravatingly enough isn’t an option when buying Microsoft points (don’t even get me started on Microsoft points), forcing you to actually spend $12.50 instead of just $10, I got to hit that precious ‘Play Game’ button. Needless to say, I jumped right into single player mode.

I was quite surprised to find out that it was necessary to play through each mode in order to unlock the others. It kinda sucked; at that point, I didn’t care about any other modes in the least, I just wanted to see how much better Evolved looked and felt and played and sounded and was. Nope! But at least it doesn’t take long. Gotta start out with Deadline, followed by King, and THEN you can play Evolved, which comes before the other three, Pacifism, Waves, and Sequence (we’ll get to those later). So I rushed through the other modes as quickly as I possibly could ’til I could play Evolved, only to be seriously disappointed.

I guess this is as good a time as any to bring up how the Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is different in general from Retro Evolved original. First of all, the scoring system is different. After killing an enemy, you’re rewarded with little green crystals called Geoms, which let you control your multiplier to an extent. These crystals stay essentially where you killed the enemy, but if you get close enough to them, they float toward you and you pick them up. Gathering these Geoms raises your multiplier, which is quite important to the fundamental gameplay. (You also don’t lose your multiplier when you die). In Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, your multiplier would increase every time you hit a certain amount of points since your last increase. The introduction of Geoms brings about some notable points: 1. This is a much higher scoring game than the previous iteration; you’ll find yourself at 1 million points rather quickly. This is directly due to the Geoms. Each enemy drops at least one Geom, with most dropping two or three, so when you’re spraying through groups of tens of enemies, it’s easy to unknowingly have a multiplier of a few hundred. 2. Geoms create a trade-off situation (remember economics?): Either focus on raising your multiplier by killing individual enemies and moving to where they used to be, or kill groups of enemies in order to survive (and disregard the multiplier) if you don’t want to get neon-colored blood on your hands (geometric shapes are people too!). 3. Remember how much it sucked to use a bomb, knowing you’d be wasting all those points? Now, when you use a bomb, all the Geoms from the enemies stay there, but they’re scattered across the screen, so you can only get a certain amount before they disappear (which they do after about four seconds). As far as the score goes, if you’re not into the higher scoring flavor of this game, just drop the two numbers furthest right, and it seems like it should be pretty equal to what you’d have in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.

Geometry Wars has always been about intense, neon colors, but I think they’ve finally pushed it too far. The colors in this game will make your eyes seriously burn. Enemies explode in a burst of color that trounces the old game’s bursts. Not only that, but the color of the explosion is random, instead of coordinating with the color of the enemy like before. Sometimes it’s so bad you can’t see where anything is, once in a while even your ship. Stray enemies that get caught in the middle of a color explosion are essentially invisible, and it’s much easier to run into them without even knowing they’re there. Often times it’s so bright and colorful, you literally get disoriented and have to reacquaint yourself with what’s going on. The worst is when you pop a black hole, the things that suck up other enemies; prepare to be flash-banged when you kill one of those. All in all it makes gameplay less enjoyable and much harder.

One problem they seemed to address in this version is when enemies spawn on top of you, instantly killing you. In Evolved 2, they take about a second longer to spawn, giving you time to avoid them adequately. That being said, I have to gripe about where the enemies typically spawn this time around. Previously, many of the enemies would come out in large numbers from the corners of the screen/grid. This time, they seem to appear much more randomly, and scarcely come in groups from the corner. This gives you much less of an advantage (no circles this time around) because most of the old techniques for killing large groups of these guys go out the window, leaving you scrambling to shoot the ones all around you.

As far as the enemies go, they’ve revamped the old ones, and added a few more in there to kill you dead quicker. The spinning purple fans are the same, the green squares seem faster and more aggressive, the pink squares are kinda pink cubes now (though they seem a bit more tame than before), and the blue diamonds sometimes come in much larger groups than previously. The snakes are pretty much the same, too, but they give you a bunch of Geoms when you kill ‘em. They’ve added a an enemy that consists of two 2-D squares connected, which flips end over end really slowly and isn’t much more dangerous than the purple fans. They’ve also added yellow arrowheads that start at one end of the screen and shoot to the other, often times coming in rows that may be as tall as the grid itself. Another new bastard enemy is a group of little blue circles surrounding a red, commander circle that, when taken out, kills the blue circles. The black holes have more sucking power, and as stated before, cause severe vertigo when they explode if they’ve pulled in more than a couple enemies. Another enemy they’ve added that sorta hovers around the grid are what I’m going to call “Gate Bombs.” These floaters are dumb-bell shaped, and if you hit the sides of them, you die. If you go through the middle of it, it blows up within a decent radius. Once you learn how to use these, they become infinitely helpful, providing a quick and efficient way to kill multiple enemies while on the move. However, it’s a double-edged sword, because setting one of these off will piss all the other enemies off, and send them flying at you with increased speed.

There are good points about this game, too. The grid itself looks much cooler than before, and is only noticeable when you’re shooting, moving around, or when something explodes. The grid effects look cooler too, like when you set off a bomb, gravity just goes nuts, pulling itself in every which way, much to the pleasure of your eyes. The graphics in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 trounce the previous version by leaps and bounds. They’ve done an extremely fine job making the explosions look vivid and saturated and detailed, no matter how much I complain about it during gameplay.

Multiplayer is, as expected, fun. You can play with up to four people, and you can play cooperatively with them, or you can vs. them. The screen zooms out when two players travel too far away from each other, which is a little disorienting at first, but you adapt. You better adapt… anyway, the only time I’ve found any power-ups, in the form of weapons, shields, and speed increases, is in multiplayer. The problem is, they come in the form of a color-changing star, so if you’re in the middle of battling a bunch of enemies, it kinda looks like one, which isn’t exactly inviting. If one player dies in a vs. round, the other is left to fend for his/herself, unless it’s a game mode that only gives you one life to begin with, in which case, if one player dies, the game ends.

I’ve concluded that the new modes exist mostly to develop one’s skills in order to play Evolved better. That’s not to say that they’re not fun though.

Deadline – This is Geometry Wars for noobs. You get 3 minutes and unlimited lives to rack your score up as high as possible. It’s not very fun because it provides basically no challenge, but you’ve gotta start somewhere I suppose, and the fact that in this game there actually is a place for noobs to start will make the game much less frustrating for a lot of people.

King – Kind of a modified version of King of the Hill, where you can only shoot from inside the provided blue circles. You’re only given one life. Upon entering the circles, they turn green. Once you’ve been in the circle for a set amount of time, it turns red and starts to shrink to nothing. Obviously you have to switch circles at this point, given that there are at least 3 on the screen at any given time. Enemies can’t enter the circle, but they can gather up all around it. Luckily, in King the Geoms seem to last a bit longer than normal. There’s a cool effect when you’re outside of the circles, the music sounds faded and muffled, which adds to the experience. This mode is surprisingly fun, and probably helps increase your accuracy.

Evolved – I think I’m actually disappointed at Evolved 2 when compared to the first, but at the same time, it’s new and it’s different, so it can’t be too bad. It’s more hectic, explosive, colorful and crazy than the first, kind of like Retro Evolved 1 on acid. This is the main part of the game; the only limiting factor is your skill level. You start out with 4 lives and 3 bombs, and then the enemies start appearing. One huge complaint I have is that in single player there aren’t weapon upgrades anymore. Used to be, every 10,000 you got would change your gun, but I haven’t reached any score yet in Evolved 2 that changed my gun. That’s basically it. Not necessarily the most fun of the modes included, but certainly the biggest and most in-depth.

Pacifism – You know, I dabbled in pacifism once, myself. Big Lebowski references aside, this is probably by far the most fun and addicting of the games in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. It’s based on an achievement in the original for which you have to avoid all enemies for thirty seconds without shooting. They’ve modified it to where you can’t shoot at all, but they give you Gate Bombs, so the point of the game is to get the enemies to follow you to the Gate Bombs, then explode as many as possible at once. Again, you’re only given one life. I can’t stress enough how addicting this game-type is. I can see people getting super good at this.

Waves – This mode is completely new, due to it being almost completely based on the new arrowhead enemy. They start out coming at you in small waves that increase in size until a full wall of arrowheads is shooting straight toward you. Once more, you only have one life to live. I can’t describe how startling it is to see an unexpected wall of arrows shooting straight toward you. Before you get used to it, it equals certain death. Waves isn’t overly fun, and is usually more frustrating than enjoyable. Not as lame as Deadline, though.

Sequence – Last of the new modes, Sequence consists of 20 challenges. You go in chronological order, and you have to complete each challenge in 30 seconds or less. You have 4 lives. This mode is extremely hard past the third challenge, and if you die in a challenge, you immediately move on to the next. If you run out of lives you don’t get to play the rest of the challenges. This one really motivates you to get better, and helps you avoid enemies, as well as learn to take on huge amounts of them.

I think Evolved is finally a fitting term for this game, because compared to the previous version, this is like a completely new game. I have some very big complaints about the game this time around, but there’s only so long I can be negative about it. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 almost feels strangely temporary, probably due to its multiple game modes compared to the previous iteration, making it seem like the Evolved mode isn’t actually its own game. However, it’s great that through the new game modes newer players have a place to train and get better, rather’n diving right into Evolved mode, naked, hungry, and scared. Also, the fact that you can pretty much control your multiplier now is a huge advantage that wasn’t around in the old game. The addition of these Geoms is really growing on me. The game doesn’t feel like a sequel, but more like an addition to an existing franchise. It improves upon the original in many ways, but for reasons unknown they changed a few of the best gameplay aspects of the game in removing power-ups from Evolved, making it (sometimes) too colorful, and making enemy attacks more random, allowing less room for technique. Thank God I’m finally done ranting; Midnight Marauders is waiting for me.