Something a little different this week, a video game review.  I am not a big video gamer anymore.  There was a time when I was in front of a playstation or Xbox for 2-3 hours a day on average, but those days are behind me.  While I still own a lot of that stuff, my video gaming now is limited to about an hour a week, usually a short session on the wii.  It is pretty rare for me to buy a game, and even more rare for me to be excited enough to write a review of a game.

I purchased World of Goo and I have been addicted since Friday.  The gameplay is very original, but if I had to categorize it, I would call it one part lemmings and one part Jenga with a healthy dose of physics.  It is available through the wii's online shop for $15.  Google tells me the PC version is available for $20.  Both are excellent prices for this independently published gem.  I haven't been this excited about a puzzle game since Katamari Damacy, and this is far less likely to make your thumbs fall off. 

The basic gameplay is simple - each level you have some balls of goo trying to reach a pipeline.  You stretch the goo balls to build structures designed to get your remaining goo out of the level.  If you do it efficiently, you will have goo left to escape. 

 What is so addictive and enthralling about this game?  WoG is a game of architecture.  You have to build your goo structure so that it won't fall into a pit, sag onto the gears, touch the spikes, topple over, or fall into a giant creature's stomach, etc.  That sounds easy and repetitive, but the game has a great physics engine which ensures it isn't as easy as it sounds, and the fantastic physics engine and the variety of goo types make every challenge different.

Graphics

The graphics in this one are cutesy, cartoony, and what you have come to expect from puzzle games over the years. The art style reminds me vaguely of Ren and Stimpy or Toejam & Earl. The backgrounds are attractive, but a bit plain. The goos themselves are not pretty, but the graphics are very functional and smooth. The structures you build sway realistically in the wind, and flex realistically under their own weight. The graphics are nice, if a little plain. 

Soundtrack

The sound is surprisingly good. The songs are catchy and not repetitive. The songs fit the art style, sort of upbeat, cartoony, and fun.  I would describe the soundtrack as jazz meets video game pop.  World of Goo is strangely relaxing and I think the music contributes to that strongly.

The goos make a variety of noises, and your structures will creak sometimes. Moving terrain features make some noise.  The noises are cute and do not overpower the excellent music.

How to Play

Using your wii-mote or your mouse, you click and drag balls of goo (which float around your structure until you use them) stretching them to create new walls and points on the structure. 

There are different types of goo, with different properties.  For example, black goo creates two walls when stretched between two points.  There is a white goo that can create three walls.  There is a green goo (up to four walls) that can be removed and replaced, a clear "drool" goo that creates only one wall and sinks, a balloon goo which creates one wall and floats, and several others which I haven't uncovered yet, as I am only a few hours into the game.   According to the internet, there are flame goos, bomb goos, sticky goo, infected goo, indestructible goo, and more.

With a few exceptions where you use your goos to manipulate scenery objects (like balloon goo floating an obstacle out of your way) the entirety of the game is drop and click goos onto each other to build structures.  The depth isn't in thumb skills, the depth of the game comes in the skill you gain in creating well supported structures made out of the whacky but fairly predictable goo.

I mentioned some of the obstacles from the levels above.  The levels are well designed and clever.  The physics engine is so good, just building a bridge across a small chasm is an interesting challenge.  The large example photo above (which I think is the second level of the game) shows this perfectly.  You can see where the player built down the hill for a little support, and now is trying to build straight up so that when the tower becomes too heavy/tall for his support structure, it topples to the right, hitting the other side and forming a bridge.  The other strategy you use in this situation is to build down and brace the bridge against the side of the canyon a little bit, which allows you to build straight to the right further before droopage occurs.  Here is another great screenshot:

This level gave me some problems, I think I got it on the third try.  You can see here, you have to use the balloon goos to keep the bridge from hitting the spikes at the bottom, but you also can't be overzealous or your balloons hit the spikes at the top and pop.  The more structure you put into your bridge, the less goos you will have left at the end.  On the other hand, the less structure you have, the more flexible it is and that makes it more difficult to manipulate it with the balloon goos.

This is a crappy picture but it was the only one I could find of my favorite level in the first chapter.  You and your goos start out in the stomach of this giant beast, and you have to try to build a structure in his stomach to get up into the esophagus, then build a tower up out of his throat.  The cool part is, once you manage to lodge your tower in the creature's throat, you can detach the green goos in the stomach and use them to build on at the top- eventually you rescue all of the goos from this creature.  I found trying to lodge the tower in his esophagus in different places to be very interesting- and a lot of fun when I screwed up and it slid down. 

The Good

1. Relaxing, addictive, surprisingly fun puzzle style gameplay reminiscent of Lemmings. Reminds you a bit of katamari damacy, because it is an addictive puzzle that requires a combination of creativity and knowledge of game world physics.  This is what you hoped you would see available when you got your wii. 

2. Insanely easy controls- you will be playing competently in 15 seconds.

3.  Brilliant level designs which take advantage of the simplicity of the game in clever and sometimes ferocious ways.  My television has been a veritable goo-ball death camp the last couple days, thanks to some difficult level designs.  Quality level design with easy controls was the formula for great 2D platformers like Super Mario 3, and World of Goo reminds me of that game in a way; both are greater than the sum of their parts.  Great level design alone won't save a game, and neither will easy controls.  But, when you combine both in an attractive package, you've really got something special- and World of Goo is that sort of special game.

The Bad

1. No real multiplayer support. It would be easy (and fun) to do a side by side race mode, but that is absent. There is a cooperative mode, but I think that would be pretty frustrating as one person would take over as the designer and the other would end up following orders- or you would both try to design your structure and the result would be a mess. This is especially disappointing considering the wii's online capabilities.

2. I don't think the game is especially long. I've played three hours of the game and I'm through the first of four chapters. My progress has slowed as I reached more difficult challenges but I would be surprised if the game had more than 15-20 hours of gameplay.

Mitigating this flaw is an OCD requirement for each level.  If you perform a level within certain limits for time, moves, and goos used, you get a little OCD flag on the level. You could get a lot of repeat play out of the game if you wanted to go back and get this for every level, because they are almost all insanely hard to get OCD flagged. 

Conclusion

I'm excited about World of Goo, not just because it is an innovative, relaxing, and entertaining puzzle game, but because it is cheap and available for download through the wii store.  As I become less of a hardcore video gamer, this is exactly the sort of stuff I want and this is exactly how I want to buy it- sitting on my couch in my MC Hammer pants with a beer in my hand.  I hope that the success of World of Goo encourages more developers to move this direction and target a little different audience.

If you like clever puzzle games, this is one you cannot miss.  Great for the wii and I bet the PC version is just as good.  Oh, and finally, there is a free PC demo.   http://2dboy.com/games.php