FEATURE: Broken Gameplay in Geometry Wars 2
- Scribbled on August 1st, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Action, Features, Microsoft Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade
I’m currently reviewing Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, and I must say it is an impressive game, managing to stuff six unique gameplay variations of the original game into one package. When you’re able to nail five of six, it’s a great batting average. What’s frustrating is that the sixth mode could own them all – but fails.
The sixth mode I refer to is Pacifism, in which your ship is unable to defend itself from mounting hordes of blue diamonds save by scurrying through gates that explode, taking out nearby enemies. It’s my sort of arcade action – helpless and alone, and desperate to defeat the waves of enemies approaching you.
Except it’s broken.
The problem is pretty simple: the odds are too stacked against you. For one, the gates themselves are somewhat deadly – the orange ends will kill you. Right there, the game fails. In a survival arcade game, your benefactors cannot be partly deadly. When you’re rushing towards a group of gates – which rotate, by the way – it’s actually a bad tactic because sure as shootin’, you’re going to die. Not good when there’s a wall of enemies bearing down on you. In a fast-paced arcade game, being forced to think rather than react obliterates the entire experience. I think on my feet, but when you continually get punished for being clever because one idle spinning gate just happens to zonk you, you become frustrated and worry more about your allies rather than your enemies, which by any definition is counterproductive. Here’s an example: imagine if in Pac-Man the power pellets were deadly if they flashed blue? It doesn’t help when four ghosts are flanking you. When you have no offense, you can’t have your defense be risky in an arcade game.
Advice to Bizarre Creations #1: remove the deadliness from gates. They should never be harmful. There’s hundreds of enemies already to make the player sweat.
The other problem is that the gates are sort of weak. They have no real blast range. If I have a clustered group of 100 enemies on my tail, I want to see a bigger wipeout when I trick them. In fact, something that would make the game look more impressive is if they had a chain reaction destruction like Every Extend Extreme Extra. Yeah, baby – look at them blow. If anything, allow for a slightly bigger blast radius so I feel like I accomplished something.
That’s all I want – to be able to fly into a group of gates and feel safe, and to have some extra pop. If you patched the game to include those two minor changes, I wouldn’t stop playing the Pacificism mode.
The problem is, though, Bizarre Creations is a British video game developer, and from more than a quarter century of videogaming, I can tell what that means. Every Brit dev seems to confuse “frustrating” with “fun”. A great example is Psygnosis, who made irratatingly difficult game after game that made me want to toss my Amiga out the window. What’s ironic is that Psygnosis is all but unknown now, and their greatest legacy was a game that was easy and fun: Lemmings. There’s a lesson there.
August 1st, 2008 at 5:32 pm
With all due respect, saying the mode is broken because you die a lot is pretty flimsy reasoning. The entire point of the mode is about accepting your limitations and chasing high scores with them. You want to stop dying from the gates? Stop crashing into the edges. And calling for a patch? Talk about overreaction; it’s been two whole days and you’re questioning the developers over a “game-breaking flaw” that can be solved by just practicing more.
And I think the blast radius is perfectly fine; once you get a large swirl of enemies around you, you can take out a ton of enemies. It’s not suppose to wipe the entire board when you trigger one.
August 1st, 2008 at 5:38 pm
NO, that “I die a lot” is NOT the issue. It’s not that I die, it’s how I die. I know a bad gameplay mechanic when I see it.
In an action survival game, you can’t have your sole mode of survival be dangerous. See the Pac-Man example. (When you’re doing the Wax On/Wax Off achievement, the Pac-Man parallel strengthens.)
I’ll say it right now: Pacifism is my favorite mode – or would be if it gets fixed. Right now, King is my favorite til then.
August 1st, 2008 at 5:40 pm
[...] the full complaint at GameStooge: FEATURE: Broken Gameplay in Geometry Wars 2 Filed Under: Geometry Wars, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade Comment (1) Email SHARETHIS.addEntry({ [...]
August 1st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Why *can’t* you have your sole mode of survival be dangerous? It’s all a trade-off between risk and reward, with the latter growing constantly as you progress. Furthermore, the gates aren’t the only means of survival — just avoiding the diamonds will do. But you don’t just want to survive, you want to score points. Gates can be avoided entirely if necessary, something which Pac-Man is unable to do in your example.
If I was to draw my own parallel off the top of my head (this could very well be a straw man), I would say your complaint could be leveled at another action survival game, Resident Evil. You need to shoot an enemy to progress… but you also need to reload. But reloading might get you killed if done with poor timing. Your primary method of survival is placing you in danger, isn’t it?
August 1st, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I don’t know. It seems to me that if the changes you want were implemented, the mode would be may too easy. As it is, I have no problem reaching 20 million points, and I never once felt the mode to be unfair. Heck, one of my friends on XBL hit 40 million.
It’s not broken to have the gate ends. Otherwise, you may as well be grabbing bombs. You just need to plan your routes and pay attention to other gates. This is what the mode was designed to do. It’s like calling Sonic the Hedgehog broken because you drop all your rings and not just one when getting hit.
August 1st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
It would NOT be too easy.
Ever play Superman 64? That’s the pleasure of having to navigate through rings with a severe time limit.
August 1st, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Kind of a tangent here, but: Lemmings is kind of an interesting choice as Psygnosis’s greatest legacy – if only because they were only the publisher. It was developed by DMA Design, who are better known as Rockstar North these days.
Psygnosis’s best-known internally developed property is probably WipeOut, which is brutally difficult at times.
August 1st, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Hardly. Lemmings has sold gazillions and has been developed for nearly every platform in existance.
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:05 am
Sure; I’m not disputing Lemmings’ brilliance. I had it for DOS back in the day and picked it up for PSP a year or two ago, and still play it. It just seems odd to me to pin Psygnosis’s greatest legacy on a game they did not even make, instead of a series they’ve continued to work on (even if they’ve done so as Sony’s Studio Liverpool). And unfair to DMA, although they probably don’t need more credit these days, given what they’ve done under their new name. Plus, Wipeout was popular enough that Sony saw fit to have it on the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 as well.
Now, Lemmings is the best game Psygnosis ever published. And maybe that’s enough to make it Psygnosis’s greatest legacy – it’s just that I’m not convinced of that. YMMV.
(My view is probably a byproduct of buying a Playstation in 1996 just as I started high school – my first “big purchase” ever. Psygnosis made some very good Playstation games. The Playstation is also the last system I’ve played where I was any good at difficult games.)
Having just played Geometry Wars 2, what I found interesting is that the deadly edges on the gates didn’t bother me in the other modes, only Pacifism. Really, that’s the only mode that I could never manage to get through the gates – I’d imagine that’s because I don’t have any other options in how to destroy things.
August 2nd, 2008 at 2:14 pm
“The sixth mode I refer to is Pacifism, in which your ship is unable to defend itself from mounting hordes of blue triangles…”
They aren’t triangles. Knowing that, maybe you’ll get a better score next time.
[Except I'm in the top 5 percent in scores of Pacifism. Just be glad I didn't say Green Clovers or Purple Horseshoes. - Jonah Falcon]
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:21 pm
It is frustrating at first to die flying into the gates but after a while you accept it as something that needs to be dealt with. I really think it would be to easy if you could just fly through the gates. Try clearing out a bunch of gates even if they are not killing the enemies. Its when they get really clustered along the sides that it becomes very difficult.
August 3rd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I think something else being overlooked here is the fact that gates are enemies, not allies. The point of pacifism mode is not simply to survive, but take out as many enemies as possible (for scoring purposes). The destruction of one type of enemy, of course, facilitates the destruction of another. Leaving the gates unchecked will also cause them to clutter up your screen and make it difficult to navigate, not unlike the blue diamonds.
Is a game mode broken when the enemies can kill you?
August 4th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Practice makes perfect Jonah…
August 4th, 2008 at 10:17 am
I’m in the top 5% of Pacifism leaders. I know how to play it, thanks.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
You should stop trying to defend yourself because, no matter what you say, the majority of us won’t agree with you. Pacifism is the best mode. End of discussion.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I got the Wax Off Achievement. In your face. :p
August 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Couldnt disagree more. If the gate ends werent deadly, I feel like I could play this mode indefinately. The blue diamonds are very easy to avoid, Simply “ball them up” and circle around them. This can go on forever pretty much. Clearing the gates before they turn into a clustered up mess is part of the game.
August 5th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
If you’re ranked in the top five percent on this mode’s leaderboard, then it’s clear that the odds aren’t stacked too high against you, but rather that you may have assumed unreasonable expectations for your own performance.
I have the Wax Off achievement as well, if that helps at all.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
No, it means I am not stating that the gameplay is broken because I’m incompetent. I know how to play – I know it’s broken.
August 10th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
[...] only defense is flying through exploding gates to thin out the enemies. The gameplay is a little broken, but it’s a fun mode. Again, only one [...]
August 11th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Beg to disagree here. You’re making it sound as if there are etched-in-stone rules of game design that nobody should break, ever. And that they somehow cover such a specific example as the ‘barbells’ in GW2 Pacifism mode. The way the gates work is part of the challenge of the game, nothing more, nothing less.
By stating your 5% ranking it sure sounds like you’re dealing with the challenges just fine. What’s the problem? That it makes it harder? Well…
…why pick on the gates? Why not complain about the speed of the blue square thingies? The size/speed of your ship? Lack of a screen-clearing bomb? You already mentioned the limited explosion radius of gates. You could focus on a dozen different gameplay features that make pacifism more difficult then it otherwise could be.
You are dealing with all the other variables yet you can’t deal with this because you think it breaks some eldrich writ of game design? I’m sorry, but like most others who’ve responded (if you haven’t figured out the trend so far), it really just sounds like a whine more then anything else. Which is fine. I whine about features in lots of games too. Most of which I then simply don’t play. Calling something ‘broken’ because it doesn’t suit my taste would just come across as arrogant more then anything.
Now, is it frustrating to die by those accursed gates? Sure. Also frustrating to die after 1000 points because of laziness, bad piloting, or a hundred different ways to misjudge a maneuver resulting in game over.
I’m addicted to death with pacifism. No idea where I rank (high score 49 mil which currently is around 7700, only managed a 92% toward a Wax Off so far). I have no problem with the gates being what they are. I’m not fighting with the gates, I’m fighting against my own high score and those of my friends. Just like any other game. As long as we’re all competing using the same game rules, which of course we are, nothing is ‘broken’ per say.
In fact, I’m sure by now you’ve got the Achievement for getting 1 million in each game mode. Bizarre considers each mode to be equal on that front. I’m willing to bet good monopoly money you’re highest score in terms of sheer points is in Pacifism. Mine sure is. It was, in fact, the easiest BY FAR to get 1 million points in. Based on criteria of points attained, it’s the easiest of all the game modes (for me anyway). So again, this hardly sounds broken.
Now, if they did patch the game to change the orange parts to simple solid ends (so you couldn’t run into a gate sideways, you’d still need to cross the blue line on a more or less perpendicular flight path) I’d be fine with that too. Whatever, it’s Bizarre’s game to build. High scores would go up I’m sure, and we’d still compete based on the new game conditions. In the end nothing changes. 1 less challenge to overcome, unless as part of the patch they introduce enemies that behave differently then the blue squares, thereby making it even HARDER then orange gate ends. Would it be broken then too? You see? It can go back and forth like that forever with a zillion different boons or banes inserted or removed to affect the difficulty of the game. Focussing on just one item and calling it a game-breaker just seems out of left field.
August 12th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Isn’t this just semantics? If a “survival arcade game” needs that particular feature, then Pacifism isn’t a “survival arcade game”, it’s something different. That doesn’t, by itself, argue for this mechanic being a bad one.
I think the deadly gate-ends are necessary. When blue diamonds increase in density, that doesn’t make them more deadly (they bunch up into a “blob”), it just gives you a higher score. The deadly gate-ends are the only thing that makes the game get more difficult as time goes on.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Pacifism is probably my favorite mode. It is very easy to avoid the ends of the gates, but if you’re not skilled enough, you could always avoid the gates all together. The gates are for scoring points, and (not surprisingly) that requires skill.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:03 pm
I purchased an Xbox 360 two years ago /because/ I played Geometry Wars.
I just finished playing Geometry Wars 2 for the first time tonight. Only having that one joke of a gun /completely/ ruins it for me. It’s just too difficult for me to use and survive for longer than a few minutes in any of the game modes.
So, it’s just not fun. I want my money back.
Also, what the #### were they thinking with the ridiculous quantity of fireworks? I’m sorry, but when I can’t see /anything/ because a single black hole enemy makes the entire screen go completely white, there’s a problem.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:01 pm
The problem isn’t the gates so much as that they move around unpredictably. If they rotated with any sort of defined physics where you could accurately predict their movement beyond twitch motions, you could plan around them. But some float so aimlessly as to not move, some spin relatively rapidly, some go one way, some go another. Combine this with the fact that they AND the enemies spawn randomly and all of the planning skill disappears. The game is pure twitch luck and how well you do depends STRICTLY on spawning once you attain a certain degree of skill.
Also, yes, don’t get me started on how the screen can literally blind you with white as you progress in any mode, making you die just because you can’t see.
November 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I think you’re just mad because you suck at it, if every game had to follow some equation or mathematical rule like you argue with this dangerous mode of survival crap, I think we all woud have been bored a long time ago.
Superman 64 however was the most horrible game I have ever played, I would even group it with yoshi’s story