World of Goo (Wii, PC, Mac)

———-
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1
Online: Leaderboard
———-
Developer: 2D Boy
Publisher: Nintendo/2D Boy
ESRB Rating: E
Release Date: 10/13/08
———-

World of Goo is one of those bite-sized games you can consume before it gets stale. The tower-building puzzle gameplay offers a level of accessibility that should appeal to casual gamers and deep innovative puzzles that should appeal to just about everyone. There’s not too much incentive to replay the game, but at $20, you get what you pay for and more.

No, Really.
Ok, try this on for size: beverage-driven tower building puzzle game. Go ahead and read it a couple of times if you think that will help, but it won’t. Despite that initial roadblock, World of Goo delivers arguably the most accessible gameplay of the year that makes the most of the Wii’s gestural control scheme.

The idea is actually simple. The World of Goo Corporation has extended pipes throughout the word to harvest goo balls. Goo balls, being an unhappy combination of curious and stupid, glom themselves together to build towers that reach the pipes, where they are transported to the corporation and processed into popular beverages and other products. See? Beverage-based tower building puzzles.

The gameplay comes in as you take individual goo balls and build them toward their final destination. Grabbing a ball with the Wii remote and passing it near another makes a bond appear between them. Release the goo and the bond becomes permanent. As you might imagine, each puzzle starts with a limited number of goo balls, and so the player’s job is to make them stretch the distance while leaving as many free goo balls as possible. It’s a bit like a deliberative version of Lemmings.

Though tower building alone is enough to distinguish World of Goo from the workaday puzzle game, it turns out that things are even stranger. As you might imagine, goo towers aren’t rigid. Rather, they sway in the breeze, collapse under their own weight, and even bend as inquisitive goo balls climb over them. This flexibility opens up all kinds of unexpected building challenges and solutions that keep the game interesting.

Hold This Jello. Now Make a Fist.
It works well, too, when the Wii remote lets it. World of Goo is definitely the child of Tower of Goo, its PC-based ancestor. The precision building required as the game proceeds definitely emerged from its mouse-controlled antecedents. The Wii Remote’s often imprecise and occasionally unstable pointing can lead to frustrating errors.

Fortunately, 2D Boy has sidestepped the problem by including an undo command. Unfortunately, invoking it suffers the same problems. Going back a step requires clicking on one of a limited supply of small moving dots. So if one of them is buzzing near a goo ball, odds are good that you’ll end up fumbling with a goo ball instead of undoing your original mistake, or worse yet, accidentally clicking undo after placing a tricky goo ball. It doesn’t happen very often, but the problem wouldn’t even exist with unlimited undo commands or by making it a context-insensitive button.

The occasional snafu doesn’t really harm the overall gameplay, though. There’s a wide variety of goo types and a number of environmental hazards that might initially seem impossible to circumnavigate, but that just makes it even cooler when you figure it out. Unlike the typical puzzle game, solutions are based less on sudden insight and more on hypothesis testing as you incrementally progress toward your goal. So you never fruitlessly beat your head against a puzzle without progress. Even when you fail in World of Goo, you’ve learned something for your next attempt.

Puzzles aside, the rest of the game hangs together quite well. The art looks something like a cross between Hot Topic and Flash animation, but it fits the ridiculous story of tragic corporate excess quite well. The world and everyone in it are no smarter than the goo balls they consume, and it’s a treat to usher them to their doom. The soundtrack consists most memorably of staccato orchesteral work reminiscent of In the Hall of the Mountain King (though there are a few more ambient tracks as well). It ties everything together with the squeaks and whoops of the goo balls into a whimsical package.

The package is pretty small though, and marathon gamers will have no trouble wrapping up World of Goo in a day. The game does make some effort to encourage repeat playthroughs by offering OCD awards (Obsessive Completist Distinction), which are essentially Achievements for each of the game’s 47 levels. There’s also a free play level which is essentially an expanded remake of Tower of goo where you can compare your tallest tower to other players across the world. Unfortunately, neither is particularly likely to hold your attention for long. Don’t let World of Goo‘s length dissuade you, though. As with Portal before it, berevity is the soul of good game design, and World of Goo burns twice as bright for burning half as long.

Full Circle
World of Goo is a fairly brief, but clever and well realized puzzle game about building bridges and towers from gelatinous materials. Its uncommon accessibility and fast learning curve should appeal to gamers with time budgets, its innovative gameplay and unusual whimsy should endear it to even the jaded hardcore, and the deep puzzles with multiple solutions will keep genre fans happy. It could only be better if it were portable.

What It Costs: $20

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $35
•To The Genre Fan: $40
•To The Casual: $30

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags:   2D Boy · Review · Wii · World of GooNo Comments

Trackback to this article.