The drone is an AI helper that can be very handy in a fight, and they come in five different version with five potential super abilities. Once a level is complete the geoms collected get added to a running total you can spend on upgrading the drones and their special abilities. Still, with a bit of patience and a lot of restarting, that three-star rating isn’t too hard to obtain. Levels are supposed to begin easier than they end to help you get up to speed with the challenge, but the speed that the enemy swarms increase is just a bit too slow, especially on the later levels when you’ve had more than enough prior experience swatting small ship clusters and just want to get on with things. Getting there can take a bit of patience, though, because one of GW3‘s weaker points is its pacing. Survival is the tricky part, of course, but if you can get through a swarm in the latter half of a round your score is going to appreciate the effort. What this means in practice is that the race from zero to 100,000 takes longer than going from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000, especially seeing as by that point the enemies will be swarming thick and deadly. Each one collected adds an x1 to the score multiplier, and it’s not unusual to finish a level with each enemy being worth 600x or more its base value. Every enemy killed drops a little green chip or two, called geoms. Scores can get a bit ridiculous as you go, due primarily to the potential for the score multiplier to increase without limit. Once a level is open you can play it as often as you like, chasing after a full three-star rating and a spot above your friends scores on the leaderboard. Each level has a set of score targets to aim for, with rewards ranging from one to three stars, and if you don’t earn enough stars the section’s boss fight remains locked until you go back and improve a bit. One level may see you with only a single life, smart bomb, and bonus ability to reach the maximum high score, while the next might be a score attack with infinite lives but limited time, or a battle in an arena that’s gradually getting smaller and smaller until there’s no place left to dodge. Each level is its own variation on the Geometry Wars theme, with different goals, enemy mixes, and individual leaderboards. The main mode of Geometry Wars 3 is Adventure, which strings 50 levels together one after the other with six boss fights interspersed along the journey. It says something about the effectiveness of the level design that the best arenas are the ones that are mostly flat, with all the action happening on a single (non-sphere) surface. The familiar claw ship and the hundreds of enemies swarming the arena surface all travel the same way, making the 3D levels serve the purpose hiding encounters around the curve of the world and while providing a nice bit of eye-candy. Bullets fly as if the world was flat, wrapping around sharp corners or up the curves of a sphere, traveling as if there’s no 3D bending to the arena. Levels can be set on spheres, cubes, whatever a peanut-shape is called, or even on the traditional rectangular surface given a slight bit of warping at the edges. While the twin-stick shooting is set on a plane, same as normal for the genre, that plane isn’t likely to be flat this time around. Geometry Wars 3 is an arena shooter wrapped around a series of 3D objects. For those curious as to how it stacks up to its forerunners, though, I can say that just because GW3 is easily the weakest entry in the series, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. For the sake of this review I’ll be approaching GW3 mostly from the latter perspective, because every game element feels like it’s been re-thought from the ground up to present the series to a new audience. There’s two ways to view Geometry Wars 3– either as a new game in the Geometry Wars series, or as its own individual game, free from expectations based on previous series entries. After all this time waiting a new Geometry Wars is a real treat rather than simply the latest game in the series, and if Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is more a franchise rebuild than a true sequel it’s still a fun little twin-stick shooter. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 came out a little over six years ago and how on earth have six years gone by since then!? Still, it beats getting bludgeoned with annual sequels, so it’s hard to complain too much.
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