I recall reviewing Angry Birds once upon a time, and posing the question how something with such a simple concept could end up being so challenging.
This is the same sort of logic I'd like to place on Geometry Wars 3, a game with a simple concept made challenging by intense dynamics.
The game is simply about controlling a vessel over a map/grid, eliminating enemies as they come at you in certain ways, depending on the specific shape. A large part of success within this game is to memorise the patterns of shapes and how they make any given level play out, developing your strategy to success based around this.
There are a variety of game modes, where some will be as simple as reaching a target score within a certain time limit or number of lives, where other variants will include clearing waves to trigger extra time and only being able to accumulate a score by moving between safe zones.
The variety within the different game modes makes for a relatively immersive experience, with an addictive pick up and play element. The game also contains a Single Player Adventure Mode, a Co-operative Adventure mode, a full selection of "Classic" game modes and Bonus levels, all of which are spread out evenly across the requirements of the medium-sized 31 trophy strong list.
The "Geometry Warrior" trophy, awarded for Earning 3 Stars on all 50 levels of Adventure Mode, is the main focal point of this journey, and will require you to achieve all 150 stars on offer throughout the Single Player experience.
Each level has 3 score requirements, scaling up depending on how well you perform within that level, and these seemed to be very hit and miss in terms of difficulty.
My personal recommendation would be to just reach the conclusion of the Adventure, which simply requires you to "pass" the level in order to move onto the next. This merely requires you to earn 1 star for each level. As you progress through the Adventure Mode, and get further towards the end, you'll be able to unlock upgrades for your vessel, which are important to maximising the 3 star requirements from certain levels. This is why it's better just to go through the Adventure Mode to completion, and come back with a full arsenal to tackle this trophy.
Prior to the commencement of each level, you'll be required to choose a "Drone" and a "Super". The Drone is how your vessel attacks the enemy, and the Super is the power you can trigger externally to support your Drone. The final Super you unlock is the Turret, which was pretty much a failsafe for me whilst going back through these levels. I didn't have any reason to chose anything else once I had unlocked this, and since you obtain it very late on during Adventure Mode, this is another reason to backtrack through the game once you've passed it.
In the end, there were about 9/10 levels which caused me any sort of genuine difficulty, but perseverance is the key to all of this, and the most common theme within this game. Spend time remembering the patterns within the levels and you'll eventually get there. That's not to say skill isn't required though. You'll need to think and act fast, as well as display some crucial sleight of hand to get through this mode and earn this trophy. Things get manic, and fast in some situations. Enemies come at you from all angles and it's an assault on the senses with millions of different things happening on screen at any one time.
As you go through Adventure Mode, you'll pick up a small handful of other trophies along the way, but for the most part these are spread out quite broadly across the game.
The "BFF" trophy, awarded for Achieving 3 Stars on all 10 levels in Co-op Mode, will require you to beat the shorter, but arguably more challenging Adventure Mode within the game. This is exactly the same blueprint as the Single Player Adventure Mode, a series of levels culminating in a final boss level.
The important caveat to this is the fact that the Co-op mode with Geometry Wars 3 is actually local Co-op, and not Online-based. My initial strategy was to attempt this with someone else, and whilst you can probably beat the Co-op mode with somebody who is merely a means to an end, obtaining 3 stars on every level in order to unlock this trophy is a different matter, and the person I chose just simply wasn't good enough to help me get to where I needed to be for this trophy. It's certainly designed in mind of playing with someone with a reasonable level of competence at the game, and that just comes with a learning curve that is simply too steep for another player who is new to the game.
This meant my alternative option was to play solo with an idle controller as the second player, and this ended up being a bigger challenge to me than the Single Player Adventure Mode, despite the Co-op Mode only containing a fifth of the levels.
It may seem like an obvious statement to suggest that I struggled within a mode that was built with scoring targets benchmarked against the assumption that more than 1 player would actually play the levels out, but this is the exact reason this trophy ended up being worth mentioning here. The approach of leaving the second controller idle whilst I chased around attempting to get 3 stars solo felt like chasing a lost cause on numerous occasions, with around 2/3 of the levels especially making it feel like I was reaching a point of questioning whether it was actually physically possible for 1 person to achieve a 3 star score threshold designed for multiple people to achieve together.
I trusted the faith in the tip-off that someone had told me they had managed to do it solo, and stuck at it, eventually getting there. I'm sure it may have been quicker and much less challenging to actually play with somebody else, but the availability of the other person to be with you physically when you need them is a big barrier, compared to just being able to pick it up and play solo whenever you wanted to give it another shot yourself.
Either way, this trophy was worth a couple of notches on the difficulty rating alone, and as soon as I realised this was local Co-op only, I knew this would present it's own challenges at some point.
Once you've beaten both Adventure Modes with 3 stars in every level, you'll actually have only put a dent in this trophy list, such is the vastly spread-out approach here. There are a fair amount of extra-curricular trophies awarded for beating developer high scores across certain levels and fulfilling certain requirements within specific additional game modes away from the Adventure. Most of these are fairly straight-forward, and shouldn't take more than a handful of attempts, however, herein also lies the most challenging trophy within this whole list.
The "Retro" trophy, awarded for Scoring over 10 million on Evolved Classic Level before losing a life, is a tall order, and really tests the skills you'll have picked up along the way whilst tackling this trophy list.
Evolved Classic is one of the more vanilla game modes, where you have 5 lives to accumulate as many points as possible before those lives expire. However, you need to be able to reach 10 million before even losing just 1 of these lives in order to fulfil the requirements of this trophy, and this is tough.
The level reaches certain points where there's a ridiculous amount of things happening on screen at any one time, to the point where it becomes genuinely confusing. Within the early stages of attempting this trophy, which was incidentally the one that triggered the Platinum, I knew this would cause me issues. It wouldn't have felt right for this game to end on a light note, without having one last obstacle thrown at you.
I did find good success in using whirlpools to my advantage, allowing them to suck up enough enemies before destroying them, which releases big scores and Geoms for multiplier purposes, accelerating your score significantly. You will still need large slices of luck in order to somehow not die as you approach the 10 Million score mark, and the 5 bombs you get can be timely saviours when you need them most, but this is still the most skill-reliant trophy in the game, and I spent sessions going for this to no avail before I achieved, and given that this was the final trophy I needed for the Platinum, that was wholly frustrating.
The "Gatherer" trophy, awarded for Collecting 1 million Geoms in Adventure Mode, is worth a final shout purely for it's grindy nature.
The trophy only counts Geoms collected through the Single Player Adventure Mode, and once I had collected all 150 stars in accordance to the above "Geometry Warrior" trophy, I still needed around 300,000 Geoms in order to achieve this trophy, which essentially just required booting up a specific level and replaying it over and over in order to accumulate the excess amount of Geoms left over. It was long winded and unreasonable.
I felt like I spent a decent amount of time with the Adventure Mode to getting to the point of collecting all 150 stars, and still ended up way off the requirement of this trophy, so it was frustrating to carry on playing the Adventure Mode without any real reason to continue it further other than for the fact that there was another trophy that was reliant on the Platinum. There are a few games that fall victim to having trophies that outlast their content, and this is one of them.
Overall, this list provides a strong challenge. The Single Player Adventure Mode is well fleshed out and contains a reasonable level of challenge that prepares you for some of the extra difficulties that lie ahead.
The difficulty experienced within the Co-op mode will be purely based on which approach you decide to take when tackling it. The Solo experience is probably the hardest method, but the reliance of another person will still require them to master the game to some extent, and I suppose that will be dictated by your own circumstances and how accessible a partner is to you and how inclined they are to stick out a game that requires alot of patience to beat. I found it the harder of the two Adventure Mode trophies purely for the fact I didn't really have a feasible local Co-op option, despite attempting it this way before choosing to just go with it on a solo basis.
The clean up operation is seamless for the most part, with developer high score trophies and classic game mode trophies not really causing too many issues, especially after having the practice of going through 2 Adventure Modes that peak the difficulty of this game. However, the "Retro" trophy will act as a final curveball to test your skills once more as the exclamation point on this list.
Due to the trial and error nature of the game, it's difficult to put a time range on it for total completion. My personal experience was probably somewhere within the 50-60 hour range, though this isn't tracked anywhere in-game, and my completion time from first to last trophy spanned a period of 5 years and 11 months, due to the fact this was a game I picked up and played on a very sporadic basis, making it even harder to nail down an actual completion time.
If you have the patience, this will go along way to beating this game, but you'll need the skill to go with it too.
Notable Trophies -
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| Geometry Warrior - Earn 3 Stars on all 50 levels of Adventure Mode. BFF - Achieve 3 Stars on all 10 levels in Co-op Mode. Retro - Score over 10 Million on Evolved Classic Level before losing a life. Gatherer - Collect 1 million Geoms in Adventure Mode. |
Hardest Trophy -
Retro Score over 10 Million on Evolved Classic Level before losing a life.
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