Dislikes:
Enemies spawn without any significant warning and occasionally right on top of you. Eventually this kills me rather than any failure to dodge enemies.

Not enough screen real estate for your size and speed.

report

report

Dislikes: The WASD control scheme. Had to re-train my twitchy controlling instincts, but after five minutes I had gotten decent at it. But that was the point where I got bored and began to loudly sing Midnight Train to Georgia.

report

dislikes: random enemy spawn location can be problematic (sometimes its very easy and sometimes its auto-loss)

report

Dislike: Feeling hemmed in, WASD implementation not immediately intuitive for steering/dodging
Like: Fun I guess

report

As Kieron wrote in that review of Biology Battle on Eurogamer – nothing compares to Geometry Wars, so what the bloody hell are these people thinking making a game so much like it?

Sadly, can’t comment on Space Pips as there’s a suffusion of pink instead of a game when I try and play it but there’s plenty of room to manoeuvre with the arena shooter still – it’s just that, umm, people tend not to. I know I’m criminally biased in this regard given it’s my chosen genre of choice to work in…

The thing is, with GW:RE2 and BB is that GW:RE2 has been put together with a lot of love and attention to the player. BB is a massive cludge of a checklist and design by committee over the player and makes loads of elementary mistakes. Multi-hit enemies, FEATURE! FEATURE! FEATURE! over FUN! FUN! FUN! and it feels stale and second hand from the off.

Or in short, BB is just bad game design incarnate. GW:RE2 is the polar opposite (evil random spawns in Waves excepted).

Mark Incitti who wrote GridWars/GridWars2 wrote Atomhex (http://www.incitti.com/atomhex/)- which brings a heck of a lot to the genre. It’s not very pretty and sort of the sulky goth cousin of Geometry Wars but there’s some cracking design work there. It takes some getting into but once it flips your brainbonce switch into understanding what’s going on, it’s awesome.

Veck (and the still sadly unreleased sequel) do some pretty smart things and turn the genre upsydownsy a bit. (http://smayds.com/games/veck/).

And y’know *cough* War Twat *cough* ;)

There’s still loads to do with the twin sticker/arena shooter templates. I guess some folks are just plain uninspired though :=D

report

Dislike: I was taking a break from working on something exactly like all of that (minus the chimes) to read RPS. Now I’m going to go to bed crabby.

report

Dislike: Runs like crap on my computer, which just makes me want to load up Retro Evolved and be able to use a proper dual-stick configuration (sort of; I have a PlayStation controller connected to my computer for gamepad purposes) to play. Also, this game reminded me of my irritation at the fact that GW2 still isn’t on PC.

report

Dislike: It’s crap.

report

Thing I Did Not Like: The dispersion of the pips. During the process of kiting enemies, I tend to end up as far away from them as possible. Multiple enemies result in me moving backwards, away from the cloud; the dispersion and transitive nature of the pips means that by the time I’ve dispatched a group of enemies, all that’s left is a sparse, spread-out, and quickly disappearing cloud of pips. Many of which are off the screen.

I understand that it’s supposed to encourage more daring play, rewarding players for dispatching enemies at closer range and making risky dives into dangerous areas. But I don’t like the feeling of disappointment one gets from finishing off the last of a swarm, and finding nothing left of them but a few scattered pips blinking out of existence.

Having the pips slowly gravitate towards your ship might have solved this, ensuring at the very least that they’d probably mostly still be on your screen when you finished.

report

Dislike: the essentially abstract nature of the game.

report

I think that’s what I like most.

report