I’ve done it. I’ve finished a game.
I made it to the end of World of Goo. Obviously it’s not a long game, and therefore I could actually find the time to finish it. I thought I’d offer my own thoughts after the panoply of reviews that are appearing on the web … speaking of which, someone somewhere pointed out that the metacritic Wii/Pc scores are appearing to be the highest ever. That may be a little over-the-top. It is certainly one of the best games this year. I’m sure once more reviews come in it’ll calm down to one of the best games ever. Anyway, I’ll keep this brief:
- World of Goo is a superb puzzle game that you must play. With the demo now available, and it also available on Steam (hurrah), what are you waiting for?
- The artistic design is lush. Every level is gorgeous.
- It’s worth playing just for Chapter 4 (”everything changes”)
- The music is for once in a game memorable. Even though most pieces are short (except for one which is too short and got a tad annoying; the level with the red carpet spike thingy), they loop back almost seamlessly. Not since Little Big Adventure 2 have I enjoyed the ambience and music in a game so much. The same goes for the Goo noises. “Unatco”, as RPS pointed out seemed to be spoken. I think they sometimes also say “Astranaar” from WOW. “What-is” is just the best.
- The puzzles are genuinely puzzling. However, I had gotten the impression that you would learn new skills (a la Portal) that you could then transfer to the earlier levels to collect more goo, but this wasn’t the case for me. Maybe I was just great from the start. There were some levels that took me longer than 5 minutes to complete! However, I think the more simplistic the level often the better. Some of the early ones are in my opinion the best. And the last 3 levels, super!
- The different Goo balls are worth playing through the game to discover. My favourite are without a doubt the balloon Goos. The physics and sound make these a pleasure to just play with. A sandbox lanscape to experiment with would be nice. A level editor maybe??
- Re-playability – Definitely worthwhile. You’ve got the option to go back to each level to get more Goo for your ever-expanding Tower Of Goo (but why put the cap at 300 balls? You easily achieve this way before the end of the game), and there are the OCD achievements to get … some of which seem impossible!
- The Story – there’s a story? Yes, it’s in there. Not quite sure what it all means, but its abstractness makes it highly amusing and compelling to continue.
- Sign-painter comments. I need say no more.
- On a downer, I’d have liked the ability to zoom out a bit. On some of the larger levels having more perspective would have been good. Go patch it man.
I think you should play this. It might not be to everyone’s taste because it’s a puzzler. However, the physics, design, artwork, music and story make it an incredible production from such a small first-time team. I wish them the best success for the future. Keep your nose on 2Dboy.com
Overall then, I’d give it a Game-Jabber jabberness score (I’ve just made this ranking system up Sam, feel free to scrap it) of 89 Jabberwokkies (I don’t know how many Jabberwokkies make up a whole, but 89 seems like a pretty decent score).
Now go get Gooing!
[...] Of course World of Goo features in this list. But you should have read about that already. [...]