GEOMETRY SURVIVOR Xbox Series X Review 6.5/10 "Geometry Wars + Vampire Survivors" 🕹️ @brainseal #IndieGame #GameDev

Most people of a certain age remember the first Geometry Wars and/or its sequels. Classic twin-stick shooters in a wireframe world, the original was an Easter egg in Project Gotham Racing, back when developers occasionally did that sort of thing (Galaga on the loading screen for Tekken springs to mind).

Flash forward to today, where devs happily mine old and new concepts for inspiration. Geometry Survivor, at its most basic, is a mash-up of Geometry Wars and modern single-stick auto shooters. If you’ve played the excellent Brotato, or the quirky-yet-great Vampire Survivors then you know what I’m talking about. In fact, Geometry Wars plus Vampire Survivors gets you, well…you can see where I’m going with this.

So, what we’ve got is a top-down shooter where you do your best to dodge waves of enemies, hoping that your auto-firing weapons take enough of them out to keep you alive. The gameplay loop is simple: survive for 20 minutes to beat the game, then unlock some new stuff to try and beat your high score. 

The graphics, although based around simple shapes, are lovely, fast-moving and bright and as smooth as you like, even with a screen full of enemies, bullets and neon explosions. The sound is good too, with little cues that tell you when each weapon is ready to go, enabling you to strategise a little bit to maximise your chances. The music is fine, although as an experiment I turned it off and used Spotify to play music from Rez Infinite, which worked very nicely.

During your run you’ll pick up and power up new weapons, from the Clock Gun that spits out bullets in a clockwise circle, the black hole that hoovers up everything around it, to the allied ship that locks onto multiple enemies to thin the herd a little. 

Destroying enemies leaves behind currency to pay for upgrades in two ways: upgrading your evolution level in-game to get more powerful, and collecting credits that unlock permanent power-ups between runs. 

You can buy stat boosts that do things like increase your health, speed or the loot pickup range, but you can also get new ships that work differently. Your basic Hexagon ship is your starter model, but you can upgrade to the Randomizer, which picks weapon upgrades automatically rather than letting you choose, or the Time Crawler which speeds up the whole game by 30%, in case you didn’t think it was enough of a challenge.

SUMMARY

And actually, that’s where Geometry Survivor falls down. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll clear your first run; I think I did it on my 6th or 7th try. When you’ve done that there’s not actually all that much to keep you coming back. 

Yes, there are the power-ups and different ship challenges, but they don’t radically affect the game enough to keep you interested longer than a couple of hours. It’s a shame that the achievements are designed so that you max out the 1000 Gamerscore simply by completing it once, too, as that might have increased the longevity a bit. 

But that’s not to say you won’t have fun while you’re here, and with this game at a budget price (£6.69 in the Xbox store at time of writing), the whole shiny package is one to consider.