World Of Goo 2 review: an inventive return to goo with some flies in the ointment
Goo-fing around
The first World Of Goo was a cheerful parade of goopy engineering with a sense of never-ending novelty (well, never-ending for about four hours). Every level would introduce a new goo type or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that challenged you to get a gaggle of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with just as much twitchy eagerness as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goos at the player in an effort to keep you on your sludge-coated toes. That pursuit doesn't always result in pleasing new levels, though. There is a "hit and miss" feeling to things this time around. But those hits are hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for more sticky structure-building: I hope you like comically unpredictable fluids.
As before, the goal of each level is to get a set number of goo balls to a distant pipe, which is often suspended in the sky or hanging in a perilous void to one side of the screen. Through judicious use of different goos, you'll build dodgy suspension bridges and wobbling towers in an effort to "rescue" as many of the wee blobs as possible. You can get a special award for beating a certain time, or using a limited number of moves, as well as saving a high number of the gloopy boys.
But things are rarely as straightforward as the likes of Bridge Constructor. Your building materials are googly-eyed weirdoes, and they are not confined to a single species. Some goo balls from the first game have returned, like the flammable matchstick-headed goos that cause fiery chain reactions. Or the green velcro-like goos that can be re-used over and over again. Balloons also make a return, their floatiness helping to steady your crane-like creations ("steady" being a relative term).
Many other goos, however, are new. There are translucent "conduit" goos which act as hollow straws to slurp up any liquid they touch (more on those liquids in a moment). There are cheesy yellow gooboids who can create a solid surface, pink goos that grow and stretch when you wet them with liquid, like grotesque "just add water" toys. And the opposite of this, pale blue goos that slowly contract when wet, resulting in structures that scrunch in on themselves like a melting crisp packet in a campfire. By the fourth chapter of the game, outlandish stuff is happening that basically turns the game into a series of goo-based gags. Before you know it, you're playing with gravity, golf balls, and genre itself.
It's the fluid simulation, however, that is the prime puzzle provider here. Pools of black liquid need to be slurped up and transformed into goo balls. Streams need to be redirected with little water cannon squid heads. Some seas of fluid will provide power to thruster-mouthed beings that in turn propel goo boats, or balloon-supported jet packs. Fiery lava presents its own problems (and, sometimes, solutions).
This Buckaroo-stacking of puzzle ingredients is both impressive and, sometimes, a bit much. Where one player might relish in the indulgent piling on of different goos, another player might feel a sense of wasted opportunity, harbouring visions of a game with twice as many levels, making fuller and more focused use of all the goo-based possibilities. That's not the puzzle game 2D Boy seems interested in making, though. This is as quickfire and jokey as the first game and just as obsessed with rapid re-invention. Saying there is too much novelty in World Of Goo 2 is like going to soft play and complaining that there are too many colours in the ball pit.
So yes, that sense of increasingly ludicrous stakes is still intact, even thematically. Levels go from placid islands of calm to blustery sunsets to stormy nights, as hundreds of thousands of years pass from one chapter to the next. All the while the music ramps up from delicate flamenco guitar to epic horns to apocalyptic choral chants, giving each chapter a marching sense of progress, perfectly matching the increasing complexity (or madness) of the goo puzzles. It's an upward launch into the clouds of gooey lunacy that'll be familiar to anyone who stacked goo blocks or spoke with a sentient search engine in the first game.
The developer's characteristically light satire is also in full swing. World Of Goo Corporation is rebranding, and an early cutscene sees humanity rushing off to go shopping "sustainably" (but not before chucking their children's plastic bottles on the ground as they run off). The game's tongue-in-cheek sign posts make a return too, at one point insisting that the erectile pink goos, with their throbbing veins, are perfectly normal. "Alternative interpretation of the grow balls natural behaviour is neither intended nor should be inferred," says one sign, in full denial of the dick tissue.
It all makes for a goo(d) time. But then there are those "misses" I mentioned. Not every level is a delight. For me the worst offenders are time-constrained levels, such as one where a timer ticking on a pipe counts down to the moment when hot lava pours out, primed to destroy your goos. Or another where the pipe ejecting useful liquid counts down to the moment when the liquid stops pumping. I'm not convinced these mandatory timed challenges feel right in a game that is otherwise happy to let you play at your own pace. They feel designed to add some pressure, yet more than making me act fast, they simply create a level where at least one restart feels expected. I was similarly irritated by levels in which your light sources are limited, or those in which your environment is constantly moving, where the challenge becomes building a structure while the structure itself will not stay still. Yes, some of this game's appeal comes from the fiddliness of its globular building material. But there is a point, for me, when fiddly becomes frustrating. It is a blessing, then, that you can skip any level without repercussions.
There are other annoyances. The WASD keys control the camera but the screen will also auto-scroll when your cursor is near the edge, and there is no option to turn this off. So if the location you want to click is near the edge, the camera sometimes moves a slight yet significant distance at just the wrong time. On top of this, the white flies from the first game that act as an "undo" button make a return, but their mosquito-like movement around the screen makes them troublesome to actually click. They also hang out predominantly near the edge of the screen, which means when you hover the cursor toward them, the screen edge scrolling kicks in again - aggghhhh! This is the video game equivalent of trying to follow a link in your browser and the HTML shifts everything on the website downward in the moment you click. I suspect World Of Goo 2 is probably wonderfully designed for tappy tablets and other touchscreen devices. But with a mouse and keyboard it can feel awkward. A simple undo key to burst a fly (wherever it is) would remove a lot of this friction. Maybe they'll patch that in, along with screen edge disabling. It's possible!
It would certainly clean things up. For the times in this sequel I spent sucking my teeth, I spent twice as long in a satisfying, engineer-like "LEGO" trance. Some of its frustrations feel intentional - the game's whole schtick is a certain amount of unpredictability. Your components are never 100% trustworthy (they are made of jelly, duh) and the physics simulation is as much at the mercy of wild fluid, or the impact of goo balls, as it is at the mercy of gravity alone. In this sense, the misclicks and fumbled balls (oo-er) in World Of Goo 2 exist as stray irritations, and the fiddly levels - as much as they grate me - exist as a byproduct of an inventiveness that elsewhere produces wonderful moments.
The biggest concern for anyone eagerly anticipating this sequel (hi, Graham) is that it can't keep up with the frenetic creativity of the original. And I can safely confirm that this is not a problem for Goo 2. If you were after another silly ride in a lazy river of black gunge, then jump on in. The goo's fine.
This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the developer.