I blame the summer heat. I’m not sure why I’ve strayed from the narrow tradition of “typical” action/racing game reviews I’ve done for the past 10 years and just moved on to other types of games from other genres. But that’s the way it was, and although I was reluctantly doing reviews of adventure, puzzle and point-and-click games earlier this year, I now feel like it’s only done me good to branch out.
It feels almost bizarre that it’s been nearly 16 years since I last played World of Goo, and that was on the Nintendo Wii. Now it’s back, and it’s still the same developers behind the sequel, which is almost the same thing, in almost exactly the same way. You’ll have to solve various types of puzzles by using your own slime to construct different types of structures and buildings. Your black slime can form all sorts of building blocks to help you solve even the most difficult physics-based puzzles, and all of this is conveyed through a hand-drawn, humorous, charming aesthetic that’s changed little since the first game.
The challenge here is basically just as simple as in the previous game, it’s just that getting there requires me, as a player, to think about the task once or twice. At the start of each level there are a number of “Goo Balls” that need to be moved from one place to another, and to do this you have to build DNA-like ladders out of goo for the other guys to move around on. It’s still like a mix of Worms, Lemmings and Rolando, and it’s still fun.
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For a physics-based puzzle game, World of Goo 2 has more story and narrative than most, and while the first game was a sort of sly satire on our consumer society (packaged as a sloppy cartoon children’s program), here in the second the developers are deliberately poking fun at the current woke trend. It would be perfectly fine to criticize this game as homophobic or perhaps even racist, but it’s just as easy to see it as a relatively mild satire on our times, and while I could live without the story itself (and the monkey business in between), I’d be lying if I said I was bothered by the often political jokes on offer.
The biggest addition is the “liquid goo” that makes up a large portion of many of the physics-based puzzles, which wasn’t the case in the technically more primitive original. I like this improvement, but I doubt it’s enough to make the game feel like the proper sequel we’ve waited nearly 16 years for. There’s untapped potential here, there’s some repetition, and while some parts are charming, I can’t really say I feel particularly entertained after a few hours of World of Goo 2, because if anything, it feels a bit old. I’m certainly not a big puzzler, but that doesn’t mean I feel particularly uncomfortable giving this type of game reviews, and overall, World of Goo 2 feels “okay” in my world. Nothing more, nothing less.
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