World of Goo 2 review — It’s GOOd to be back

Out of the Wii’s entire WiiWare library, World of Goo might have just been the crowning jewel. It was charming, weird, and most of all fun. There hasn’t been anything that quite scratched that itch of building absurd, living contraptions to solve puzzles since – until now. Almost 16 years after the original’s release, we’ve got the sequel in our hands. After beating the ~6 hour campaign in two sittings, I’d say the game was worth the wait, but with some major caveats.

If you’re unfamiliar, in World of Goo your goal in each level is to build a structure using various balls of goo to reach a pipe. You can’t just build forever though, as you have a limited number of goo balls and need to send a certain amount of balls through the pipe to clear the stage. Some levels have hazards you need to build around (or towards), some might need you to create a Rube Goldberg machine to progress, and some levels may be something completely different. World of Goo 2 is more of what you loved from the first game and then some, fully exploring the potential of each type of goo.

World of Goo 2 starts off fairly simply, with some levels that seem like exact recreations of tutorial stages from the original, but eventually goes completely off the rails in the best way. Sometimes literally. You might need to build your contraption and use goo to extend some rock formations to delay the lava coming to ruin your day or switch gravity to reach the pipe. My favorite levels involved using the green goo, which you can move even after placing, to slowly inch from one end of a stage to the other and back again. It makes for some tense building and rebuilding, with mistakes becoming more difficult and time consuming to rectify as you go. It’s all incredibly fun, with some seemingly impossible extra goals incentivising you to come back and truly master each level.

These extra goals are the same for each stage: getting a certain amount of goo into the pipe (usually way more than the minimum), clearing within a certain amount of moves, and finishing under a certain time. I didn’t get these on most stages, though I don’t think achieving them unlocks anything and is simply for bragging rights. If you’re really having trouble with a stage, though, you do have the option to skip it. It doesn’t mark it as cleared, and simply unlocks the next. I did this for a single stage in Chapter 4 because I was getting way too frustrated with its gimmick.

Speaking of Chapter 4 (and you may want to skip this paragraph because, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there may be spoilers ahead), this is where things get a bit… messy. The core gameplay changes almost completely here in three distinct ways, one of which is… a bit off color, let’s say. There are jokes that feel completely contrary to the anti-capitalist themes up until this point. This series of levels has some jokes that feel in contrast to the rest of the game’s tone. To be perfectly honest, several people have chosen to harass me over points I made previously in this paragraph (I’m changing it after the fact), so I’m going to leave it at that for you to judge.

The game itself is still fantastic overall, with Nintendo quality level design, but it does feel lacking in a few other aspects. For one, the PC version has literally no options aside from windowed or fullscreen. You can’t change the resolution, frame rate, or anything. The game looks and sounds great, with some fantastic music to fit the mood, however. There’s no controller support either, and while I do prefer mouse control, having the option would have been great. It feels like a very barebones port of a mobile game, especially given the hamburger menu button perpetually in the top left corner, the massive size of UI elements like the level ending pulley, and the way too big edge panning areas. The pulley being so huge actually got in the way of getting some flags in my playthrough, with me having to carefully avoid clicking on it while I made the final touches on my contraption.

The campaign is overall the same length as the original, with some extra hard stages to come back to to boot, but there is one thing I really wish returned here: the World of Good Corporation free build mode. In the original, this was a level in which you used all of your extra goo balls collected in the main stages to build the tallest possible tower you could. That was the part that kept me coming back to the original, and its omission here is very disappointing. Still, the game overall is well worth playing with those caveats in mind.

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