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Biology Battle Review for Xbox 360

Biology Battle Review for Xbox 360

Fight the War on Germs

When a game launches a whole new genre or brings one back to popularity after a long time out of the limelight, it always puts developers in a tight spot. Do they clone the top-seller (Saints Row, in response to Grand Theft Auto)? Or do they try to add new dimensions to a formula that already works (Half-Life, in response to Doom)?

Biology Battle screenshot

The new Biology Battle, an Xbox Live Community game from an obscure Thai development company, walks the thin line between the two approaches. It’s clearly in debt to Geometry Wars, the smashing 2005 success that brought back the arcade-shooter genre, but it introduces a number of intriguing ideas. It’s quite an accomplishment for an upstart company developing for the Community (where anyone can publish games, with oversight mainly from the Community itself).

Let’s begin with the familiar. The left joystick moves your ship, the right joystick shoots in whatever direction you push it, and you have a number of special weapons. One of these weapons is a screen-clearer you can deploy in emergency situations, but the ammo is limited. As you shoot your way through waves of enemies, bigger and bigger waves come until you run out of lives. There’s a score multiplier that changes based on several factors. You can’t “beat the game,” so the only goals are to have fun and out-score other players.

Biology Battle is far more than a clone, however. One fun twist is that you’re not in space battling alien ships; rather, you’re a nanobot that’s been sent into a person’s body to destroy a diseased cell. All the action takes place in that cell, a fact that limits the action to a much smaller area than Geometry Wars’ bigger-than-the-screen rectangle. There’s an interesting new weapon, Blast, that doesn’t kill enemies but pushes them back, giving you a little room to maneuver. Waves of germs attack you until the cell’s nuclei show up as the game’s bosses.

Biology Battle screenshot

Once you defeat the nuclei (rather tricky enemies that fire long electric charges), you’ll get the Armageddon power-up. If you want, you can keep on fighting waves of germs to rack up a high score. Or, you can hit the X button to kill the cell, thus accomplishing your mission, and transition into “Death Mode” to start scoring points there. Death Mode is a bit harder, with clusters of enemies that break apart when shot (they sound like firecrackers when you hit them) and big worms that take a lot of damage.

You can play this single-player mode offline, where there are three difficulty levels, or on leaderboards, where there’s only one. (The existence of leaderboards is a new thing for the young Community: Microsoft doesn’t allow Community developers access to the regular leaderboards, so this game’s makers had to create their own.) In the leaderboard mode, you can win trophies by meeting goals (scoring a certain number of points, or staying alive a certain amount of time, etc.).

Biology Battle screenshot

The best part about Biology Wars certainly isn’t the single-player action, though; despite its innovations, it does play a bit too much like Geometry Wars. The game’s most clever bits are in the multiplayer: Hand a friend or three your additional controllers, and the Biology Battle experience becomes quite intriguing.

If you want, you can simply play the game cooperatively, with the terrific feature that all players get to set their own difficulty levels, and the A.I. enemies treat them accordingly. There are also six competitive modes available. You can play five of them in Life Mode or Death Mode, and there’s also an option to pick a random game. You can mix and match one to five games in tournament mode, and try to win a series of matches instead of one at a time.

Survival mode is the most basic: It’s just the regular game, except you pick Life or Death Mode at the start, and instead of cooperating with your friends, you compete to kill the most enemies.

Biology Battle screenshot

Turrets adds a strategic twist. You have several turrets to deploy around the screen, and they fire fairly rapidly and accurately at your opponents. The goals are to set up the turrets to destroy your opponents, to shoot your opponents’ turrets until they explode, and, well, to not die.

In Wire Cycle, you have a long tail that follows your ship, and the goal is to get your friends to run into it before you run into theirs (in this mode, your ship moves forward automatically, so you can’t just stay in one place). Lasso is similar, but with creatures as well as the other players’ ships on the screen.

Froghop takes cues from Geometry Wars 2’s King mode, in that you move from safety zone to safety zone. However, the zones in Froghop stay put, and you get points based on how many “laps” you complete between them.

In Worms, the only mode in which you can’t choose between Life and Death modes, there are a lot of (of course) worms crawling around the screen, and you rack up points by traveling close to them without touching them. Here, the game’s physics really come into play, because you can ram your opponents to knock them into worms.

Unfortunately, the competitive modes aren’t playable online, and there’s no way to play them against an A.I. opponent. These are features the developers might want to add in the future (or a sequel), presuming they’re even possible within the limitations of the Community system (size probably shouldn’t be an issue, as Battle takes up only 51 MB of the 150 MB cap).

When it comes to presentation, Biology Battle is impressive coming from an independent studio. The graphics look nice, especially when they depict big, glowing enemies. The sound effects are rather standard for the genre, but they get the job done. We didn’t notice any technical glitches at all, which reflects well upon either the developers, the Community’s review process, or both. Perhaps the only problem is the music; there’s a techno number that sounds ripped right out of Geometry Wars, and a few rock tracks that don’t really fit the game’s science-fiction theme.

All considered, Biology Battle is a terrific example of what the Xbox Live Community can accomplish. A small, foreign company has put its best foot forward and offered consumers some fresh twists on an old-but-resurgent genre, packing it all together in a slick, polished presentation.

Yes, it’s missing some features we’d expect from a full-out Xbox Live Arcade release, and it’s especially frustrating that the best modes aren’t available to single players. Sure, it owes some major debts to Geometry Wars. But there’s a ton of innovation here, and arcade-shooter fans would be well-advised to give it a download. The developers and Community should be proud.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.2 Graphics
Not quite up to the bar Geometry Wars and its sequel set, but this is a very good-looking game. 5.0 Control
Shares Geometry Wars’ intuitive, responsive setup. 2.5 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
This is one area where the game could have used a bigger departure from the Geometry Wars formula, and the only tracks that do so are modern-rock ones that don’t really fit the game’s mood. Sound effects are fine, though. 3.9 Play Value
Addictive, if often derivative, gameplay with some innovative competitive multiplayer modes. 3.7 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • The only Xbox Live Community game with leaderboards. Xbox Live Gold members can compare scores with players around the world.
  • Local co-op. Play cooperatively with your friends and family. Unique “Asynchronous Multiplayer” difficulty system allows players of any skill level to play together, be challenged, and have fun.
  • Eleven versus modes. Play games like Worms, Frog Hop, Wire Cycle, or Turrets.
  • Tournament Mode. Play the Versus games as a tournament, with up to five rounds.
  • Trophies. Try to accomplish challenges that range in difficulty from easy to very, very hard.

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