World of Goo 2

I blame the summer heat. I'm not sure why I've gone from the narrow tradition of 'typical' action/racing game reviews I've been doing for the last 10 years to simply spending time with other types of games, from other genres. But that's how it's been, and although I reluctantly handed out adventure, puzzle game and point-and-click reviews earlier in the year, I now feel that it's only done me good to branch out.

It feels almost bizarre that it's been almost 16 years since I last played World of Goo, and that was on the Nintendo Wii. Now it's time, again, and it's still the same developers behind the sequel, which is near the same thing, in almost exactly the same way. You have to solve different types of puzzles by using your own goo to erect different types of structures and buildings. Your black goo can form all sorts of building blocks to help you crack even the most challenging physics-based puzzles, and it's all conveyed through a hand-drawn, humorous, charming aesthetic that hasn't changed much at all from the first game.

The challenge is basically just as simple here as in its predecessor, it's just the way to get there that requires me as a player to ponder the task at hand 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 accomplish this you need to build DNA-like ladders of goo via a type of Goo that the other types can travel on. It's still like a mix between Worms, Lemmings and Rolando, and it's still fun.

For a physics-based puzzle game, World of Goo 2 has more story and narrative than most, and while the first game was some kind of sly satire on our consumer society (packaged as a sloppy cartoon children's program), the developers here in the second make a point of making fun of the current woke trend. It would be perfectly fine to criticise this game for being homophobic or perhaps even racist, but it's just as easy to see it as relatively mild satire on our times, and while I could have lived without the story itself (and the monkey business in between), I'd be lying if I said I felt upset by the often political jokes on offer.

The biggest innovation here is spelled out by the "liquid Goo" that makes up large parts of quite a few of the physics-based puzzles, something that wasn't the case in the more technically primitive original. I like this improvement, but I doubt it's enough to make this feel like a proper sequel that we've waited nearly 16 years for. There is untapped potential here, there is some repetition and although parts are charming, I can't really say that I feel particularly entertained after a few hours of World of Goo 2, as if anything it feels a bit old. I'm certainly not a big puzzle player but that doesn't mean I feel particularly uncomfortable handing out ratings to this type of game, and overall World of Goo 2 feels "okay" in my world. No more, no less.