Originally Posted June 12th 2014 on the Seafoam Gaming Forums

---

 

A first game. Some of us have always wanted to make a new game. Thanks to the Wii U Eshop and the rise of indie development, for some people that’s a reality. Pablo Millan is one of those people. Joining RCMADIAX and 4 corner games as standalone, at home developers making games for Wii U, will his very first video game, GEOM be worth picking up, as the cheapest game on Nintendo’s eshop services?

Title: GEOM

System: Nintendo Wii U (Eshop)

Price: 0.99

Release date: 6/19/2014

The main game/story

If you came for a story, you won’t find one here. It’s a puzzle game with three different modes, and it’s meant as a high score game. Mode 1 is a simple game where you use the gamepad stylus to group together the same shape and earn points, Mode 2 is a simple “Find the shape” game where you look for the shape in the top left corner and go find it, and Mode 3 is a “Look for the bonus shape!” game.

Graphics

This isn’t a game that demands high-tech graphics, so all a game like this needs are graphics that get the job done. And this game certainly does so, keeping it simple without making it too confusing.

However I will have to add that in the menu, the color of the menu header (For example, it says “Main” upon startup, yet it’s the same color as the button that’ll take you to the options menu, meaning it’s easy to mistake “main” for a button. I recommended making it glow after you select it to avoid confusion). Besides that, I don’t have a problem with the graphics.

Music and sound effects:

There aren’t many music tracks in this game. In fact, there are only really about 2 major music tracks in the game. One for the menu, and one for the actual game. Luckily both songs are catchy, though I imagine after playing the 10 minute mode you’d get sick of it.

As for the sound effects, well… There’s only one. In mode 1, when you clear shapes, you hear a sound effect. That’s the only sound in the entire game that I could find. It would be nice if the menu had a sound effect for whenever you clicked on something.

Gameplay

I mentioned earlier how the game modes played, and that’s really all you will get. For the most part, mode 1 is a lot of fun to replay and get new high scores on. With the Miiverse community bound to open when the game launches, it’ll especially be fun to share your high scores with others.

Mode 2 on the other hand is a bit of a mixed bag. You do have to look for the shape it asks for, but that’s really it. There’s no punishment for tapping wildly all over the place, so that really causes a problem. There should be a punishment for if you tap too much away from the requested shape, such as locking the ability to tap a shape for a few seconds.

Mode 3 suffers from the same problems as Mode 2, allowing you to essentially tap all over the place to get points without any punishment. You DO have to look out for the bonus shapes which give you more points, but with the fact that you don’t get punished for random taps on the screen, it kinda breaks this mode and mode 2 in terms of difficulty.

Glitches

Nothing bad here, but a glitch I encountered was where I went to the options menu and accidentally tapped “delete high scores” once. It made no sound effect, or any indication of it doing anything, so I went back to check my high scores and they were gone. A “Are you sure?” along with a sound effect would have really helped. Besides that no problems with the game glitch wise.

Conclusion

On the end, GEOM is one of the better first attempts at a video game, and Mode 1 is a LOT of fun and with Miiverse support, it can lead to lots of high score sharing, leading to a lot of replay value for your 0.99. With that said, however some balance problems with the other two modes as well as some minor glitches don’t really help the game that much. Hopefully these minor things can be patched to make it more fair and smooth. With this game being the only .99 eshop game that isn’t on sale, it’s worth picking up, if only because of miiverse sharing and Mode 1 being fun to play. Hopefully if these issues get ironed out, the other two modes can become more fun as well for online sharing. Therefore, I give GEOM a 6 out of 10, and I recommend it only to high score puzzle fans.

Thanks to Pablo Millan for the review code