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The best iOS game this week - Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions

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The best iOS game this week - Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions

Geometry Wars: Touch was among the first games to come out for iPad. Alongside Mirror's Edge, Super Monkey Ball 2: Sakura Edition, and others it represented Apple's ambition for the iPad to be a formidable gaming machine.

And it was fine. Geometry Wars: Touch worked perfectly well on iPad, but the controls weren't quite there, and, like so many early touchscreen games, it just felt like an insipid imitation of the real thing.

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Fast forward five years and we have Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions. Gone is the mildly apologetic 'touch' qualifier, and with good reason. This is pretty much the same on iOS as it is on home console.

The game develops the Geometry Wars concept in a few interesting ways.
The first innovation you'll come across is the adventure mode, which sees you working your way towards an end goal through a series of stages.

The second is the variety of the stages themselves, which take place on spinning spheres, rotating sausages, twisted planes, and so on, forcing you to consider the paths of your projectiles over curved surfaces while steering your ship with one hand and shooting with the other.

The third is the presence of upgradeable power-ups, introducing a questionable element of grind and leaderboard distortion.

Alongside all this are a few traditional modes for old-fashioned types, including the one that is obviously the best: Pacifism.

Lucid Games has attempted to make Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions more accessible by including an autofire option, but this doesn't really make the game any easier. It has also included MFI controller support, however, which does.

I don't know whether the code is better or I've just grown more accustomed to playing games on a smartphone, but this edition of Geometry Wars feels significantly easier to play than its now-distant predecessor.

But if you also happen to own an MFI controller you'll be getting an experience that's more or less the same as a full price console game for a mere fraction of the cost.

Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.