by:	December 12, 2005

If you have played the “killer app” of Xbox Live Arcade, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, then you already might know what to expect from Mutant Storm Reloaded. The game is a top-down shooter that has you controlling your ship with the left analog, shooting with the right by pressing it in the direction you want to shoot, and letting off mini-bombs with the right trigger. The mini-bombs aren’t exactly like those in Geometry Wars which clears the entire board. The game never really gets that hectic exactly, so it just clears out the surrounding area so you have a gap to move through.

The game is also cut up into 89 super-fast levels that will take you about one minute—two minutes tops. The average player will get through the game in two hours or less if they are actually that good, but nonetheless you can come back for more to increase your ranking, change difficulty settings, and so on. Each level has a different shape, and has plenty of mutants that fly at you, run at you, and shoot at you. It is great fun, but it doesn’t move so fast that you are overwhelmed and doesn’t start to get super-challenging until you make it to level 50. Eventually you fight little bosses in the forms of big eye-ball type things, along with turret guns that will regenerate if not fully destroyed, huge globs of energy, and so on. Sometimes you have to think about what you are shooting first so that you don’t get crowded, but luckily before an enemy spawns they show a “teleportation path” so you can quickly figure out what you want to do about them. As for the rest you can play a two-player game on the same system, but not over Live unfortunately, and you can do a tally mode, which basically tallies up your scores for each level and compares them with other players.

Visually the game has a gelled look to it, with very balloony environments, that are pretty unique. The only bad thing about Mutant Storm is that it is 800 points, or ten bucks when a slightly better and similar game, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is 400 points, or five bucks.

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Mutant Storm Reloaded is an entertaining game, and might be perfect for those out there who find Geometry Wars: Evolved to be to hard. If they can forgive the fact that the game cost two times more than this is right up their alley, otherwise you might want to look elsewhere.

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