More addicting than drugs, and more explosions than in a Fireworks show!
The Bad: Difficulty gets too tough, too quickly; Could have been more content...
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Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is a hard game to describe. Picture the old arcade game "Asteroids", and combine that with every fireworks show that you've seen in your life. Except, instead of big rocks floating by your ship, there are a bunch of shapes wanting to kill you. It sounds either like a dream, or just some random vision that a meth-junkie had, right?
Nope. It sounds like a strange concept, but this is the most addictive game you'll ever play, and the only Xbox Live Arcade game worth buying.
First, Geometry Wars is extremely easy to play. The left stick moves your spaceship in any direction, and the right stick fires your laser in any direction. To get points, kill anything that moves. Sound simple? It's not.
Part of the reason why Geometry Wars is so addictive is that the game gets really hard, really fast. At first, the game starts off firing blue diamonds, and purple ninja-stars at you. These shapes are easy to kill, as they are rather slow. And, unless you're really, really bad at video games, they won't touch you, and you won't die. This lets you build up confidence, as everyone ends up thinking, "Hey, this is gonna be easy..."
However, hitting around 4,000-5,000 points after killing enough shapes, things start to get tough. The game starts throwing more shapes at you, and in more different ways. Some shapes follow you. Some shapes break up after shooting them once, and then swarm you, Some shapes simply follow you, but dodge your fire if you shoot at them.
As you get a higher and higher score, more and more shapes come after you, in massive swarms. After playing the game for a few rounds up into the score range of 90,000, you'll start to get used to how the shapes work, how they move, and how they want to kill you.
The linearity of the game, while boring, is simply what makes the game so tough. It's not that the enemy shapes are hard, there's just too damn many of them at once. You do have a counter to this in the form of screen-clearing bombs, but you'll only get three to start off with, and you'll need every trick in the book to get more. A new bomb is given at 125,000 points, and for the majority of gamers, that's a very bumpy ride.
Geometry Wars wouldn't be Geometry Wars without the graphics. As I said before, it's like asteroids and a July 4th fireworks show combined into one. Blasting part an evil Blue Diamond and watching it split into a million pieces never gets old. As more and more shapes appear, the graphics get even crazier, and watching a bomb get detonated when a full onslaught of shapes are on the screen is too good not to miss.
As for the audio, well, it's an arcade game. You can play custom soundtracks, which is a big plus, as the audio isn't really exciting or anything. However, the audio gives a lot of notice as to what is spawning on the playing field, so it's very wise to keep it cranked if you want to beat all of your friends on the leaderboard.
The addictiveness of Geometry Wars comes in the difficulty and control scheme. If you lose all of your lives, you know what exactly went wrong, and you go into the next game smarter, faster, and stronger. The controls are so tight, that you never feel like the game is impossible, or that it's cheating you. There aren't any control glitches or anything like that, so the game boils down to you and the numerous random shapes trying to kill you.
In my opinion, there could have been a lot more in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved than there is in the game you download off of the Marketplace. Mainly, a two-player co-op mode would have been the best choice for Geometry Wars. It's nice that the developers included the old Geometry Wars game from PGR2 in the package, but the game is very low scoring, and the achievements are next to impossible to get in the PGR2 version.
Geometry Wars is by far the best Xbox Live Arcade game on the Marketplace. It's cheaper than most arcade games, there's no additional content that you have to spend extra MS points on, and it's insanely addicting. You get what you pay for, and while Geometry Wars is a very good Live Arcade game, there could have easily been more. But, if you have 4400 MS Points permanently stuck by your gamertag, go right ahead and buy this one