World of Goo (WiiWare)

World of Goo

2D Boy / Nintendo WiiWare

Review by Anthony

If you were to ask me to list out the games available for WiiWare off the top of my head, I’d say World of Goo, Megaman 9, and then all the rest of the stuff. You know, games that have “Fun”, “Party”, or “Action” in their title and describe a world where you can do exciting things like use the Wii remote to make things happen on the screen. Wow! But what my flippant joke is meant to illustrate is that for me, there just has not been much out there to grab my attention. I noted a lot of praise in the press for World of Goo, checked the videos, and decided to give it a download. Very, very glad I did.

World of Goo is a physics-based puzzle game that has you manipulating cute blobs of “goo” to form structures or manipulate the environment such that you can have a certain amount collected into a suction pipe at the end of the stage. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta goo it. Haha! I know. I played the game and wrote this review only so I could make that pun. Anyway, with different types of goo appearing with obstacles and environments changing, it ends up being a pretty impressive experience.

What’s goo:

- This is one pretty game. Environments in the game look stylish and full of life. Through great use of shading and color-blending, they’ve managed to create environments that look like what would happen if you modernized the look of a cartoon. The balls of goo, despite having tons present on the stage, look adorable, and the game manages to handle the presence of huge amounts of them at a time. Very impressive.

- The sound is also surprisingly great. First, the goo balls make adorable sounds as they’re placed, dropped, or thrown around the stage. Despite being a simple feature, they’re so cute that the sounds still stuck in our heads months later. The music was a big surprise too - despite that there are not a ton of songs overall, the music is awesome. There’s a battle theme-sounding song on a few stages that’s just gorgeous.

- Gameplay is very solid, and may create a few converts to the puzzle genre. Using the Wii remote (or mouse for computer players), various types of goo can be picked up and by placing them a certain distance from a base object or other goo structures, will be fused to expand on the structure. The general idea is that to finish the level, you’ll be typically making structures out of as little goo as possible so the remaining ones can be sucked into a pipe at the end. Collect enough and you can progress the level. Several types of goo will become available throughout the game though, from ones that can be detached once connected but are flimsier, to sturdy ones that make more connections, to invulnerable ones, to ones that will burn when exposed to fire. Trying to build whatever structure necessary while keeping your structure from collapsing, or your goos from going hara-kiri on you, is both tough and satisfying.

- Level design is a major highlight. Without spoiling too much, World of Goo will take your various goo challenges through a world of different challenges indeed. While the game has plenty of life with various takes on the “build a big structure to the end”, other levels manage to mix it up by taking your goo to the sky, into the sea, into a race for their lives, and battling the elements in other ways. They were extremely creative here, and it really helped make the game special.

- They added “OCD” challenges to add a little extra depth for completionists out there. You may find that several stages have you getting more than the necessary amount of goo to complete it, but you may not realize that it’s possible to get every single goo to safety. OCD challenges will have you racing against the clock, deftly planning your moves, and meticulously watching your goo in order to complete them. These add some extra depth to the levels throughout.

What’s neutral:

- If you happen to be pretty skilled at the game and have no interest in attempting to complete the “OCD” challenges on each level, you may find the game a bit short. Those are pretty big “if”s considering that few levels are particularly short as you both figure out and execute what’s needed to complete them. However, should you be abnormally good at this or always use a guide to figure out what to do, it’s entirely possible to breeze through the game in a few sittings.

- A turn-counter could’ve been useful on stages where the OCD challenge is to complete within a certain number of turns. It’s sometimes unclear what does and what doesn’t count as a turn.
- Despite that it marks the map each time you get an OCD through the game, there’s actually no specific reward for it in the end. In fact, they just take away your ability to OCD the last level. Aw!

What’s bad:

- The “timebug” system that exists for the sake of correcting your mistakes is a bit flawed. The idea is that when you make a move you immediately regret or would like to otherwise undo, you can touch a small floating timebug to go back in time one move. This doesn’t quite work as well in practice though, as while you may have just made one move that caused your mighty structure to collapse, using that timebug may just have you immediately relive the structure’s collapse, rather than going back to before the problem happened. In execution, it sometimes takes two or even three rapid-fire uses of finite timebugs to correct an error. Further, some odd things will happen upon usage, such as goo balls being used will inexplicably plummet down, or objects can readjust themselves and send objects flying. No doubt this was a difficult system to implement, but the issues are still quite apparent and occasionally quite frustrating.

The guys at 2D Boy had a vision here, and to pull it off so beautifully and creatively is quite a boon for them. World of Goo is pretty to look at, amusing to see, cool to listen to, and impressive to play through. To be able to say all of those things about a physics-based puzzle game is quite an achievement, and for that, I appreciate what they did and eagerly await their next effort.

If it sounds like it could be your type of game, then it probably already is. Just wait until you see some of the level designs in action.