Biology Battle takes the now familiar Geometry Wars style of arcade action and creates a unique high score shooter with online leaderboards, local 4-player co-op and multiplayer party play modes, and "awards" similar to Microsoft's achievements (except without gamer points).
The Basics - An Addictive 360-degree Shooter
Biology Battle employs the control scheme popularized by Geometry Wars Evolved. Players use the left thumbstick to navigate a ship around an enclosed arena, while pointing the right thumbstick to fire in that direction.
Killing enemies will give points to the player's score. Killing large numbers of enemies within a short time span will increase the combo multiplier (drastically increasing the player's accumulated points), while not killing enemies fast enough will slowly count down the score multiplier.
Biology Battle also features a "Death Mode" in which players will transport themselves into another level with a massive combo multiplier and different enemies. Activating Death Mode too soon will result in less points, but activating death mode can save the player from losing the game by destroying all enemies on-screen and temporarily slowing down the action.
The Specifics - Shoot for Those Powerups
While Geometry Wars earned players extra lives and bombs with a high score, in Biology Battle powerups, extra lives, and "lightening" bombs are dropped every so often by killing large numbers of enemies, and must be picked up by the player.
Gamers must not only worry about surviving through the endless swarm of viral enemies, they must also shoot through the hordes to pick up power-ups and extra lives.
In Biology Battle, the game is all about surviving and shooting through enemies to reach power-ups. Satellites will unleash a huge burst of bullets around the player's ship for only a few seconds. But, considering there's always enemies on all sides, the satellites become extremely useful for achieving high scores.
Aside from satellites, players acquire various abilities, such as a 360 degree burst "push" recharged every five seconds, and a gigantic black hole bomb, recharged every 7 seconds.
Graphics, Sound, and Presentation in Biology Battle
The inescapable arena surrounding the player is a cell wall that constantly morphs and bends. The virus enemies range from small globular entities, to large jellyfish-like creatures. The enemy variety is quite numerous, and the visual style is appealing and gives the player the feeling of being trapped inside a petri dish fighting an endlessly expanding bacterial infection.
The sound effects and music are both adequate, but not stellar. Audio clues would have helped in certain situations--such as a beeping noise to indicate when the shield power-up was depleting. And the music is catchy, but gets repetitive over time.
The presentation, however, could have used some work. The menus work well enough, but the HUD (Heads Up Display) is cramped and nearly impossible to see the desired information during the chaos.
Multi-player - Four-player Local Co-op, Versus, and Tournament Modes
Four-player local co-op utilizes the same mode for single-player, except with extra players. Similar to Geometry Wars, this style of gameplay is better suited for single-player, but the co-op option is still a nice addition. Skill varies significantly from player-to-player, but this problem is at least partially solved by adding difficulty options for each player.
The Versus section initially seems like a significant multi-player component, but the similarity between game modes means less unique gameplay than it may originally seem. Many modes are outright clones of other modes, except taking place in the "death mode" as opposed to "life mode" (which seems more like a different level than a whole new mode). And the tournament mode merely takes several versus games played consecutively, in which the player that wins the most rounds wins the tournament.
Despite this, the multi-player offers some casually competitive party play on top of a solid single-player game. But, the multi-player should be seen more as a welcome addition, and not a primary reason to purchase.
Biology Battle Review Conclusion
Fans of Xbox Live Arcade shooters like Geometry Wars and Mutant Storm will undoubtedly enjoy Biology Battle's frantic, high-scoring action, making it well worth the 800 MS Points out of a 2000 MS Points Card. And for another 200 MS points, Galax-E-Mail (review link below) provides more classic arcade action.
Interested in more Xbox Live Arcade and Xbox XNA Community Games like Biology Battle? Then check out this article:
XNA Community Game Galax-E-Mail (only 200 MS Points)
Bradley Kairis - Bradley Kairis loves games, comedy, technology, politics, news and journalism. From the endlessly intricate strategies of Magic the ...
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