Excerpt:
Download for PCGrid Wars 2, by Mark Incitti, is a freeware game for PC and Mac. It is, as the alert viewers of WoS will instantly recognise, not unlike Geometry Wars, the secret bonus game concealed within Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox. (Or to be strictly accurate, not unlike its sequel, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which runs on the Xbox 360 and is the flagship title of the machine's online service, Xbox Live Arcade.) In itself that'd be passingly interesting - particularly for anyone who didn't want to fork out £300 for a state-of-the-art, all-singing, all-dancing Xbox 360 in order to play a vector-graphics Robotron game - but while GW2 is undeniably closely related to GW:RE, it's the ways in which it's different that make it remarkable. Remarkable, in fact, to the extent that it's possibly the single most perfect piece of pure videogame design that this reporter has seen in the last decade.
The defining characteristic of all good game design - not just videogames - is the marriage between accessibility and depth. If you can create a game that anyone can pick up, understand and start playing in seconds without having to even glance at an instruction manual, yet which players will still be organically learning the subtleties of, and developing new tactics and strategies for, hours and days and weeks later, then you're a great designer.
Any idiot can do one of the two, and even experienced authors who seem to understand the skill of combining both can get it spectacularly right, and then catastrophically wrong, in two almost identical circumstances. But GW2 creator Mark Incitti has taken a game that was already very delicately balanced, added and changed elements that fundamentally alter the nature of the gameplay, and still come up with something that recognisably possesses the character of its parent yet is a vastly - almost immeasurably - different, and superior, game. And if we're going to try to understand how such a feat can be achieved, we're going to have to examine both why Geometry Wars is good, and why Grid Wars 2 is so much better.
Download for Mac OS X
