Preview: Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions

Since finding the original Geometry Wars cabinet hidden away in the corner of my Project Gotham Racing 2 garage I have suffered many restless nights, my sheep counting interrupted by rotating green squares and the low buzz of those blasted jacks. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is one of the best arcade games ever made: varied, balanced and addictive with excellent integration of leaderboards and friends lists. To me the series is the pinnacle of twin stick shooters.

The shuttering of Bizarre Creations seemingly killed off the series, but later this month it will be resurrected by Lucid Games, formed by former Bizarre staff, under Activision’s new “indie” label Sierra. The major worry here is the lack of involvement by original creator Stephen Cakebread and designers of the fantastic soundtrack Audioantics. While I can’t speak to the soundtrack thanks to the noisy show floor of PAX, I can say I am a little worried with some of the directions Dimensions has taken.

The 3D aspect of the game works well, once you get your head around the warped terrain it provides a unique spark that updates the way you play the game without completely changing it. I found myself having to subtly change how I approached the game, watching where my ship was rather than where it was going as the curves of the level did a good job hiding enemy approaches. Dimensions feels much more reactionary than anticipatory and it took some getting used to for such a simple adjustment, time will tell if that affects how I play the game long term.

I didn’t much care for the new methods of enemy spawns, where they are ‘warped’ in from above the playing field rather than flashing in. Dimensions had a habit of spawning enemies close by and with the new spawning method making it hard to tell exactly when an enemy will arrive on the playing field I felt cheated several times by deaths to freshly spawned geoms. This isn’t the first time Geometry Wars has had spawn problems, the snake enemy types from the original Retro Evolved were notorious for dealing spawn deaths, but I hope this is something that merely requires adjustment to a new system rather than a flaw in how the game works. I have hundreds of hours of trained Geometry Wars behaviour to unlearn here, so I will give the game the benefit of the doubt until release.

More promising were boss battles, which have the potential to go many ways but the one I took on in the PAX demo was fun. There is also a new mechanic to enable a short period of a wider shooting arc by clearing out a static formation of blocks, the weapon is a nice throwback to the first Retro Evolved and very useful in tricky situations. The game is also split into stages much like Geometry Wars Galaxies, offering the chance for more leaderboards and a variety of tailored challenges that in my brief experience covered timed deadline events, boss battles and score attacks, but offers the possibility for all the previous Geometry Wars game modes to be revisited.

A brief experience with Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions doesn’t give much away to how the game will hold up long term, most of my experience was spent getting a handle on the mechanics of the game. My initial impressions of the spawn system was unfavourable but we won’t know if this is a game breaker without extended play. There are some cool concepts here, the 3D mechanics have potential and the level based setup will offer plenty of variety and a lot of individual challenges for score chasers. I’m still looking forward to the full release, and hope I won’t be disappointed.