The player has deployed a black hole just after killing the nucleus bosses & awaiting death mode
This is the "plasma" gun - cool play on words that
Party
game fans rejoice, the 4-player co-op mode is perfect for drunken Saturday nights
As well as co-op, there's versus multiplayer modes such as Turret that involve a nice touch strategy
What is the meaning of life?
Some say that death is meaning of life, others would
argue that reproduction is holy grail of life, and a select few would
just chant "Xemu".
The age-old question that continues to taunt the
human psyche has alluded the world's most intelligent minds.
Until now.
The meaning of life, according to the W. Barker
Heritage Dictionary of Modern Culture and Cuisine, is "to experience".
Whether you experience good things or bad, wet
things or dry, you are constantly discovering - nay, participating
within - the meaning of life.
Take Novaleaf's new Xbox Live (and soon to be PC)
shooter, Biology Battle.
It provides gamers with the kind of interactive
nourishment that is rarely found in today's big budget productions;
a game you can pick up and play with a moments notice, yet which
takes aeons to perfect.
It's like Texas hold 'em poker but without the pungent
aromas, the violent debt collectors, and it is an experience that
warmed
this gamers heart.
Call me old fashioned, call me
hyper-sensitive and dashingly handsome if you really want, but this new Xbox Live
game developed by small Thailand-based outfit Novaleaf is an experience.
You don't have to save or load games, you don't
have to phaff around with instruction manuals - you just boot it up and
blast away and when it's time to stop and wash the dishes you turn it off at the wall and you
feel satisfied.
Kind of like when you've just mowed the lawn
and you find a dollar coin chewed up by the mower blades.
And to answer your unvoiced question: no, I don't
have a second wife and several offspring in a remote village
called Pha That Bang Puan.
To get a good idea of what Biology Battle is
about, either download the demo on Xbox Live, just watch the
Youtube clip embedded in this page, or close your eyes and think of
this:
A top down shooter that could be likened to a
highly advanced version of asteroids where you play a medical nano bot
inside a diseases cell where you can call in up to three other
friends to help out.
I now realise that closing one's eyes and reading
at the same time is difficult (but like understanding Scientology, not
impossible).
It's a fast-paced game that can often last only a
scant few minutes yet often feels as though you've played for much
longer, kind of like finding a rift in the space time continuum I
guess.
Of course if you're good at the game, and I mean
Katie Holmes good, then you'll last for a loooong time as you
rack up the mother-of-all high scores.
There will be myriad comparisons with the Geometry
Wars titles (the arcade game packaged with the Project Gotham Racing
games) but to cut a long story short, this is better than almost all
top-down arcade shooters before it.
Like Geometry Wars or Smash TV for the old timers,
the real challenge in the main game mode is getting the highest score,
but there are also several multiplayer mode which I'll get to later.
It may sound unsatisfying to try and reach a high
score, but the way the game flows and evolves and the speed of it all
and the way it looks makes Geometry Wars far more rewarding than it
sounds.
It's also got various difficulty levels so newbs
and veterans can tailor the mayhem to suit.
To begin with, let me explain the game mechanics:
one control stick moves you
around and the other shoots. If any enemy hits you, pop, you're dead.
It's a difficult challenging and therein lies one of its chief appeals.
The left trigger applies a speed boost, the right
trigger deploys your lightning 'bomb' that usually destroys all enemies
on screen, and the bumper buttons activate a push-back
'blast' and a black hole. The dash move is unlimited but the
others have to be collected on your biological journey of destruction.
Initially you have a little pea-shooter
gun with a slow firing rate but as you progress and pick up more weapon
upgrades your main gun becomes more powerful, able
to wipe out scores of bacterial enemies and viruses in pico seconds.
The game itself appears to take place within a
cell and don't die if you move into the cell wall which is a good
thing, and you're nano-ship must destroy the invading viruses and
foreign materials.
Your enemies often swarm at you and there dozens
of different types of enemies, all of which have different behaviours.
There's even end bosses, but more on that later.
There's your usual 'rush' enemies that attack you
en masse at high speed, there's slow floating explodey enemies, foes
that multiply and also some really innovate baddies, such as the
growing pulsating blobs of goo that if left unmolested will grow to
fill up the screen potentially quashing you.
There are also these jellyfish
things that have a protective helmet that deflects bullets
(which can sometimes be useful to create a scattershot effect) and can
only be shot from from behind.
There are various pick ups which you'll find along
the way to aid you in your cleansing quest, and which I will detail
here:
Weapon: upgrades
your main gun Shield: gives you
limited protection Extra Life: self
explanatory Lightning:
stockpiles a lightning bomb Black Hole: deploys a vortex that sucks everything in Blast: pushed enemies away from your nano bot Satellite: Tactical
short-term 360° firepower
The satellites are a really cool addition
to the game and the more you play Biology Battle, the more you realise
they need to be tactically deployed.
In essence the satellites unleash a bullet barrage
that spins around your ship for a handful of seconds, and there are
three different versions which shoot in different patterns.
Satellite #1 seems to be the most
effective and it's better to wait until there are tonnes of
enemies on screen before picking up these short-term offensive weapons,
as I discovered on my way to becoming an online scoreboard champion.
The black hole weapon needs
Staying alive in the main game or Global Challenge
(your high score is ranked with all other players - my best rank was
98th) is not easy, but after a certain time an end-boss that consists
of three large ultra-cells will appear.
Along with hundreds of other enemies on screen,
the triumvirate boss is often quite hard to beat, with each of his
three nodules having a health bar that needs to be depleted to win.
This is where the game gets interesting.
Once you've beaten the boss, you can hit X and
enter Death Mode, which is a little bit different to the initial Life
Mode where you begin the blasting.
Once you've beaten the first boss you can hit the
X button and go into Death Mode, which multiples your score with
whatever you accrued in Life Mode.
The trick is trying to stay as long
as you can in Life Mode before entering death mode, to maximise your
multiplier. Like my old English Literature teacher used to say: "The
last man standing is not always the first man fed." I still don't know
what that means...
Death Mode operates the same as the Life Mode, but
looks a bit different and provides you with a much more powerful
rapid-fire cannon from the get-go.
Some of the upgrades are also different, including
the insane plasma gun which literally paints the screen with red blood cells of carnage.
I spent a lot of time on the Global
Challenge and single-player modes and had a lot of fun,
particularly when fiendishly looking for the elusive high score.
Playing through the game co-operatively with other
players (up to four at once) is perhaps even more fun, where you can
share the joy and the agony with friends.
Visually Biology Battle is very pretty, though not
in an ultra-complex, three-dimensional way.
The graphics are very sharp and quite detailed and
the game animates very smoothly which makes the sub-molecular killing
even more gratifying.
There are some trippy special effects in there
which add some punch and the overall visual style is very cool and
suits the gameplay to a tee and while this is a 2D game, the attention to detail is pretty special.
If you do ever tire of the main game there are six
different "versus" modes, or 11 if you want to be pedantic because all
but one of them can be
played in both Life and Death scenarios.
Survival: Involves
not dying Turrets: Deploy
turrets to help defeat other players Wire Cycle: Can't
remember Lasso: Competitive
'snake': entangle your foes Froghop: Stay safe
in certain 'zones'
If you have three other mates with you in the
room, or even if there's only two of you, Biology Battle really opens
up with a range of engaging multiplayer modes.
While the single player game is very addictive and
online Global Challenge maddeningly so, the multiplayer games
that inject the kind of variety that makes party games so more-ish.
Games like turrets for instance require a bit of
tactical awareness.
You can deploy about three turrets of varying
power levels and must basically coerce your foe into the line of fire.
However what often happens in this mode is that
when trying to lure your buddies into your carefully laid defensive
perimeter, you often get killed by an errant bullet. Such is life...
Survival is fun, as is the lasso mode, but wire
cycle and frog hop were pretty forgettable.
There is also a sixth multiplayer mode that cannot
be played in both Life/Death modes, that will please the
pacifists and zoologists out there because all weaponary is removed
from the game.
Called worm, you rack up points in this mode by
maneouvering as close as you can to the giant 'worms' that break into
the cell.
It's one of the simplest, but also most
challenging versus modes in the game, and shows a level of
thoughtfulness on the behalf of the developer. You really want to get
closest to the invading worms (please, no poo jokes), but if you get
too close BAM! You're dead.
It may be one of the simplest games since the
excellent Vib Ribbon, but like that title Biology Battle is
also seriously addictive.
It's got some great single player modes and is fantastic when
played with friends co-op or versus, and considering the price of the game is around
$10 (800 points) it means you can spend the remaining $90 on *this sentence was removed for legal reasons* .
There really aren't any negatives with this game.
Newcomers to the genre will find it intuitive and rewarding while old
timers like yours truly get a nostalgic kick while playing.
While it does have competition in the likes
of Galaga Legions, Geometry Wars 2 and Ikaruga - all of which
cost 800 points - I reckon this is the best shooter you'll find on the
Xbox Live network and its multiplayer options leave the rest for dead.
Like the meaning of life itself, you have to
experience Biology Battle to truly understand it. There's no use
wondering why your life sucks and you're still an accountant working
for a fraudulent finance company. You gotta start smashing those
windows, you know? Make some noise and feel alive.
Whether going in solo to cure the cellular
diseases or teaming up with - and against - your best mates, Biology
Battle is a blast. It's got an old-school flavour combined with a
sprinkling of innovation and a jug full of a action, all of
which results in a memorable game that will eat up rainy weekends.
Arguably one of the best community games we've
seen on the Xbox Live network, Biology Battle is a slick game with
surprisingly deep gameplay that will bring back memories of classic arcade
shooters for many gamers. If you liked Geometry Wars, you're going to love this.
