Useful Tips

Review of the game "World of Goo".

At times, World of Goo barely stands on its feet - her head is dizzy from the abundance of brilliant ideas. But she grew out of a student project, the goal of which was to create a game in 7 days. The mechanism of the prototype was very simple: you could take lumps of an incomprehensible black substance in your "hand" and, connecting them with each other, build a wobbly tower.

Then the game had no end, no goal: only the "horizon", above which it was impossible to scroll the screen, and the relentless desire to complete it to find out: what's next?

Everything in World of Goo is built on the same simple principles, but you should have seen how many interesting details they have overgrown! In the first chapter, you build yourself up surrounded by pretty green hills and construct a tower-ladder along which your charges get out of the stomach of a huge big-eyed monster. The main topics of the second part are beauty, fame and ... renewable energy sources. It seems that the "parents" of World of Goo Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, who saw, sang about that. All the ideas and thoughts that came into their heads while working on the game, they ground into flour, from which they then baked the "world of slime."

At heart, World of Goo is the same fun physics puzzle; a fascinating guide to structural design. At each level, you have a certain (finite) number of building lumps, the task is to remove a certain number of them from the level and the actual exit is a narrow black pipe. To complete a level means to build a structure from the slime from the starting point to this pipe, leaving a sufficient number of lumps in stock.

Moving from one chapter to another (there are 4 of them plus an epilogue), you constantly come across new obstacles and types of mucus. You have to fight not only with gravity - the authors dot the levels with rotating blades, thorns and fire traps. In the beginning, you only have the usual black lumps. These, once taking their place in the structure, will never leave it. But very soon you will be introduced to their green cousins, which can be unhooked and rearranged to new sites. Then - with inflated lumps that float in the air, like balloons filled with helium. And with a joyfully smiling slime beauty, a huge pink ball, which must first be crushed into smaller parts, and only then shoved into the pipe. There are a lot of such acquaintances during the game.

Each chapter of World of Goo is a real celebration of fantasy and creativity. The purpose of each new element is explained to you in his enigmatic notes by the invisible teacher, the "Painter" of the tablets. New types of slime not only allow you to do what you could not dream of before, but, being mixed, help developers create more interesting and challenging levels.

I really want to tell in paints how good the puzzles are, and then tell everything about all the varieties of lumps, but if I succumbed to this desire, you would hate me. Regular puzzles have nothing to hide from the players other than their solution, but World of Goo has a wonderful storyline that is a pleasure to watch as it unfolds. While I was playing at work, small groups of people gathered around my table every now and then, observing with genuine interest the action taking place on the screen. Many applauded the short but ingeniously drawn and written cutscenes that the game demonstrates when you manage to find solutions to some of the puzzles.

Revealing the secret of the next level is never too easy. Even at the very beginning of the game, you will often scratch your head and mutter: “But how can I do this? It's impossible! " But then construction begins, and in the process the decision comes by itself. The levels are always fun, but never hard enough to get you out of the game.You never have to rely on luck to win. As a result, you constantly feel like some kind of crazy architecture genius.

For example, at one of the first levels, you start playing on a narrow platform. There is an exit directly above you, one floor above, but to get to it, you need to build a bridge to the left. Over a pond full of poisonous water, then up, bypassing the rotating gears, back to the right, to the pipe. If you get too close to moving parts, they will tear apart the structure and drown the unfortunate lumps. At first, it seems that the task is too difficult, but - the mucus holds much stronger than you think, and very soon you watch how funny big-eyed round people are sucked into the pipe.

You constantly think that you can improve the result. Used lumps most often cannot be detached from the building, which means they cannot be taken out of the level. And you constantly feel that by finding a more efficient way of building, you can save so many more lives. The OCD (Obsessive Completion Distinction) system plays on these emotions. To earn a small but pleasant reward - a checkbox above the icon of the passed level - you need to get to the exit by fulfilling certain additional conditions. For example, finish the job in 9 seconds, keep within 17 moves, or save 61 lumps where you usually need to rescue only two dozen.

After completing the game, you will either concentrate on OCD or go to a special level called World of Goo Corporation. This is, in essence, the same prototype game. Tower of Goo, but with one new detail - the online leaderboard. Other players build towers here, whose height is fixed and transmitted to others in the form of clouds with a height mark. You can start working on your pillar at almost any time, but I would recommend that you figure out the plot puzzles first. Why? Because the lumps you saved go straight here, allowing you to build higher and higher.

Just building, with no purpose and no limits, is terribly interesting. That is why I spent a lot of time on Tower of Goo. It's so simple - to pick up one lump, put it in place, then another. In half a minute, an impressive vertical structure is already ready. Everything is controlled by a single button. Big-eyed "slimes" shout joyfully, praising your architectural genius.

World of Goo is a small game, doesn't create content on the fly, and can be played fairly quickly. Here I would like to once again suggest that WoG is like a cast of consciousness for its developers. The first comparison that comes to mind is Darwinia. In the story of the flat people, there were so many explicit references to other games that it immediately became clear: they composed it with passion and love. World of Goo has a very similar feeling.

But let's add a fly in the ointment to the barrel of slime and list the downsides. When a lot of lumps are spinning on the screen, it can be difficult to pick up the right lump. Everything! I just have nothing more to complain about!

Copyright en.inceptionvci.com 2024

$config[zx-auto] not found$config[zx-overlay] not found