You know what Asteroids needs? Colour. And not in the sense of Blasteroids, but in the sense of 'let's embrace vector graphics and go all out'.
Geometry Wars may be a strange title, but it's not a strange game at all. In fact, you'll be able to pick it up in no time and challenge yourself to do better on each and every attempt, just like Asteroids all those decades ago.
I do believe it's time to shoot some rhomboids in space.
Fun Times
Geometry Wars looks rather simple in the graphics department on the face of things, but get past the 'whipped up in an afternoon' look of the menus, and all is not as it seems. I mean, it looks like a pure, top-down twin-stick shooter, but there's more depth to this game than that.
Designed to explore the nature of the Xbox controller, Geometry Wars has you move around 2D space with the left stick, and continually fire projectiles out in the direction of the right stick. That's the controls more or less sorted. Move, shoot, survive.
You'll quickly see, however, that this simple set of controls allows for some complicated goings-on. Enemy types, for example, will be introduced one by one. Some shapes - for that's all they are - will home in on you, hunting you down wherever you move. Others will dawdle on their own path through the arena, oblivious to what's going on but threatening your chances all the same.
Sometimes, a black hole - portrayed so well by a red circle - will spring up, literally bending space around it, to the point where everything is slowly drawn towards it and devoured by the extreme forces, and your shots are even bent around the new curves of space.
If this game was actually taking part in three-dimensional space, I think I'd get terribly lost, very quickly, so it's a good job all I have to do is react to all of the dazzling colours and just keep staying alive.
And boy, are there a lot of dazzling colours. All the neon rainbow is present, and everything will gladly explode into sparks of light whenever it is shot at, showering you with points all the while.
That is, apart from these green guys, who are quite content to just watch my shots warp through space from the safety of the sidelines - these enemies actively try to avoid your shots, and you'll need to overwhelm them with firepower to get rid of them.
Or, when the going gets tough, and the place fills with space snakes, you can drop a screen-clearing bomb with a press of a shoulder button and watch the universe explode, fizzle away, and slowly respawn. The waves just keep coming. Three bombs, three lives. Make them count.
Frustrations
That's all there is to Geometry Wars. If that's not enough to interest you, well, you're probably not going to playing it for very long. I was playing the Xbox 360 version, Retro Evolved, which looked phenomenally fluid, though it felt a tiny little bit off. Maybe that was me just getting used to the controller sensitivity or something, though.
After a couple of games, though, yeah, I had seen what kind of entertainment was on offer here, and instead of getting better as time went on, I was getting worse.
I didn't think I had this game for the PC, but no, I do, so I fired it up here to get some screenshots, where the graphics look worse, and the controls feel better - despite me using an Xbox 360 controller. Go figure.
I actually did better this time, seeing some new enemy, but for such a brief amount of time that I don't actually know what the threat they provided was. They were red and had some kind of wi-fi bars coming out of their face. I don't know. I either dropped a bomb or blew up very shortly afterwards, and that was that.
Final Word
Again, for as simple a game as it is to pick up and get stuck into if you're not in the mood to put in the time for a high score or anything, then is there enough here to bother with?
Not all games have to provide tens of hours of gameplay, of course not, and for what it does offer - an increasingly frantic few minutes with near-instant restarts - Geometry Wars is quite the title, packing a lot into a little.
When the music gets you pumped, and the graphics glow with the more colours you can count, you're in for a good time, but I can't see myself playing it for an hour at a time - though it is simple and satisfying enough that you easily could.
If you haven't come across it, it's well worth a few minutes of your time. Maybe you'll stick around for many more. You'll know for sure once you pick it up for a game.
Fun Facts
The story of it being a game knocked up to test the Xbox controller is real, and it was such a simple little game that it was bundled into Project Gotham Racing 2 as a mini-game for no other reason than it could be. The fact that players loved it lead to it being remade into a title of its own, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
Geometry Wars, developed by Bizarre Creations, first released in 2003.
Versions played: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, Xbox 360, 2005,
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, PC, 2007.