A Game by: Lucid Games.
Release Date: 26.11.14
Price: £13.99


Geometry Wars needs no introduction to most gamers. The first two games, from Bizarre Creations, have been synonymous with Xbox 360 gaming from the start of it’s life and are absolute classics.  They are beautiful twin stick shooters, in which you traverse a flat, single screen playing arena, while fending off the attentions of a variety of geometric shapes that appear in waves.
The whole hook with Geometry Wars is the high score chasing. There are Leaderboards for every game mode and competing against your mates was the crack cocaine of gaming for many.



Geometry Wars 3 has a new developer, namely, Lucid Games, although some of the personnel from Bizarre are on board at Lucid. This new iteration also brings some new ideas and gameplay styles. Some of these styles are new to Xbox gamers, but are actually borrowed from Geometry Wars: Galaxies which appeared on Nintendo Platforms.
Despite all the changes however, you can put all your apprehensions and fears to one side because Geometry Wars is still as awesome as it ever was, if not more so…….

The first thing you notice is the inclusion of “Adventure mode”. This is a series of 50 stages to progress through. Each one manages to have its own unique combination of conditions to keep you hooked and entertained.  To progress, you will have to achieve a certain number of stars on previous stages to unlock further levels.  Up to three stars are awarded depending on your performance.   The second thing you notice is that you have made the transition to 3D, and instead of flying round a 2D arena, you now often find yourself flying around the outside of various 3D shapes.  The gameplay is enhanced further with the addition of boss stages.



The other changes that I touched on earlier are, the addition of “Super States”, and the ability to select one of a series of “Supers” and “Drones" to equip your ship.
Super States are activated for a brief period when you destroy a series of dots that appear on the arena at certain times. These can enhance your firepower and add other useful abilities such as a magnet that attracts all geoms towards you. Geoms are the green dots that are left behind after you destroy shapes, which, when collected, increase your score multiplier.
Supers and Drones are unlocked as you progress through adventure mode and one of each can be chosen at the start of each stage. The first Super I unlocked for example is one that lays mines around the arena randomly. You usually only get one use of your Super per stage and they are activated with the left trigger at will. Your Drones are with you throughout, and can provide extra firepower, defensive assistance or Geom collection enhancement depending on which you choose. Each Super and Drone can be upgraded several levels by spending Geoms. What all this means is that Geometry Wars 3 has many extra levels of tactical depth.  The game is as fiendishly difficult as ever, and achieving three stars on each adventure stage is quite a challenge. In order to achieve this, you will have to replay stages to collect enough Geoms to upgrade your add- ons and then experiment to find the correct combination of Super and Drone for each of adventure mode's unique challenges. It all works really well and rather than dilute or mess up the classic gameplay of Geometry Wars, it totally enhances it for the better. Speaking of the classic gameplay, the other good news is that classic Geometry Wars is all here intact.  In addition to the new styles offered by adventure mode, simply selecting “Classic Mode” will allow you to play all the Classic GW modes you know and love. Deadline, King, Pacifism and Waves are all here, complete with their scoreboard goodness! There really is no reason not to love this game!



So Geometry Wars finds its way to new gen. machines in fine fettle and is better than ever. Be warned though; It is also as tough as ever. The 50 stages in adventure mode provide enough variety to keep you interested, however you may find that getting 3 stars in each stage in order to unlock the later stages is quite heavy going. You'll have immense fun trying though. In many ways it’s the perfect game.  I did find a couple of minor faults with the new gameplay however. The first one is that in certain adventure mode stages, I found that after using my smart bomb, the next waves of enemies would spawn instantly and right on top of me causing instant death. This seemed to be unavoidable and was highly annoying. The other thing was when traversing certain 3D shapes, it can be impossible to see what’s coming round the corner as you reach the edge of a cube for example.  Luckily, this is not something you will encounter very often as most shapes seem to be of the curved variety.  These seem to be quite bad flaws on the surface, but on the whole they can’t really stop you from enjoying the amazing experience that is Geometry Wars 3 Dimensions!  I do hope they can patch them out in some way though.

Buy Geometry Wars 3 NOW and let those Leaderboards consume you!

9 out of 10