

One of these elements was the inclusion of collectable geoms that act as score multipliers. In designing the gameplay Cakebread read fan made strategy guides and designed elements for the sequel that would take players out of their comfort zone. Initially the team experimented with "all manner of weird fractal stuff" but this was discarded as being too confusing. Stephen Cakebread spoke of the challenge in an interview with Joystiq: "One of our big things was when people came to our stations we wanted them to say 'Oh, is that a sequel to Geometry Wars?' rather than 'Is that Geometry Wars?' It took us quite a while to come up with something that really work". In developing the sequel the team struggled with creating a graphic style that was new but still evocative of the first game. Additionally, the game provides support for worldwide leaderboards in each game mode and, by default, displays the player's ranking against their friends during play. Retro Evolved 2 provides local cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes for two to four players simultaneously, and an exclusive "Co-Pilot" mode in which two players control the same ship, with one moving and the other firing. Additional lives and bombs are earned at set point intervals. If the player loses a life, they are taken directly to the next level, but the game ends if the player loses all their lives. The player has thirty seconds to destroy all of the enemies in each level. Sequence: This mode consists of twenty levels, each with a consistent, predetermined pattern of enemies.This mode was introduced as a minigame inside Project Gotham Racing 4. Waves: The player has one life and must avoid and destroy inline waves of rockets that fly horizontally and vertically from the edges of the game space.This mode was inspired by an achievement in the first game called "Pacifist" where the objective was to survive for 60 seconds without firing. Bonus points are earned by flying through gates in rapid succession. The player must fly through gates to destroy nearby enemies while avoiding the dangerous edges of the gates. Pacifism: The player has only one life and cannot shoot.The player starts with 4 lives and 3 bombs, and earns extra lives and bombs at set point intervals (100,000 1,000,000 10,000,000). Evolved: Similar in style to Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, the player is challenged to score as many points as possible with no time limit.Thus, the player is forced to keep moving from zone to zone to survive. The zone shrinks and disappears a short time after it is entered, causing a new one to appear elsewhere in the playing field. Enemies and geoms cannot enter these zones, and the player can only fire while inside one. Circular safety zones appear randomly in the playing field. King: The player has only one life and no bombs.During the course of the three-minute countdown, it is possible for a player to earn additional bombs. Deadline: The player is challenged to score as many points as possible with three minutes and infinite lives.There are six different game modes available: The number of points scored by destroying an enemy depends on the multiplier, which can reach into the thousands. Bombs clear the game space of enemy shapes instantly, although no points are awarded for their destruction.Ĭrucial to effective play is the score multiplier, which increases as the player collects "geoms" - small diamond-shaped green objects dropped by enemies upon destruction. Depending on the game mode, lives and bombs can be collected upon achieving a certain number of points. If this happens, the player's ship is destroyed and a life is lost. The objective of the game is to score points by destroying a variety of shapes and surviving by not touching them. The player controls a small, highly maneuverable ship that can move and fire independently in any direction.
