Green is my favourite colour, you know. I have no idea why (perhaps it’s due to it being the colour of money), but since the days of Henry being my favourite Thomas the Tank Engine character I’ve always been partial to a bit of emerald. This ended catastrophically yesterday during a prolonged session on Geometry Wars 2 when, having managed to fend off waves of orange, purple and pink floating shapes I became constantly undone by the slightly clever, slightly annoying nature of the green diamonds. I hate them. I hate them so much that I now hate the colour. Thanks, Bizarre.

Having said that, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is a game that I am utterly nuts about. I could string you all along for the length of this review and reveal my thoughts at the end, but I won’t: this game is awesome. Flying around a confined space as a little ship trying to blast enemies before they blast you has been done before countless times since Asteroids, of course, but this is about as fine a version of the classic formula that you’re going to find. Mixing in a couple of more standard modes with a selection of fresh new ideas, Bizarre have hit the nail right on the head.

Having started life as nothing more than a casual arcade bonus lodged within Project Gotham 2, the series has now gone through various incarnations of mental 2D shooting across different platforms, with it last appearing on the Wii and DS in the form of Galaxies last winter. As Jay’s review of the former proved there was a heck of a lot to enjoy even back then, and with six modes of play to work through this time around there’s an even larger heck of a lot to enjoy now.

Cleverly, Bizarre have decided to introduce their new slant on things gradually. Of the six available game types only one is unlocked at the start – Deadline - and it’s somewhat more familiar than the subsequent efforts, with you being given unlimited ships and three minutes in which to zoom around shooting enemies and collecting massive score bonuses. Taking the Galaxies route of having each enemy you shoot explode into multiplier-boosting green Geom gems instead of relying on the older method of simply chaining enemy kills together, you now find yourself having to tread a fine line between zooming into the danger zone to boost your score and finding pockets of space to work in. It’s probably the simplest mode in there, but boy is it intense.

The remaining modes are all unlocked after you’ve played each subsequent new game type enough times, which might sound annoying until you realise that they’re all superbly good fun. It’s not as if you have to pile on the hours opening things up, mind; even average players can dash through and unlock everything within the first hour, and in any case you end up enjoying it all so much that being gently persuaded to play everything the game has to offer anyway is actually no bother at all.

The first of the new modes is King, in which the player must guide his ship into little blue circles to shoot enemies who can’t follow you inside. The trick is that the player can only shoot from within these circles and that their protective bubble shield wears off after a few seconds, so you end up flying between the things in more and more of a panic whilst the enemy count tots up around you, with the constant carrot-dangling of Geoms floating around outside tempting you into open space to boost your multiplier bonus. A personal favourite of mine, this mode is the first inkling that Geometry Wars 2 is going to be something really quite special.

Evolved is next up, which is more-or-less your classic Geo Wars mode in which you have no time limit but a finite number of ships and screen-clearing bombs to use whilst you chase higher totals. They’ve thrown in every enemy type possible to challenge you. This is followed up by the decidedly different Pacifism, in which you can’t actually shoot and need to destroy wave after wave of enemies by flying through little gates, which themselves will kill you if you catch the edge. Jay and myself spent far too much time on this yesterday perfecting our elegant paths through swarming foes, and the way in which the tension ramps up as more and more coloured shapes chase you around is something that’ll have you gripping your controller and screaming into your telly.

Other than Waves, which appeared in Project Gotham 4 and tasks you with dealing with a whole mini armada of orange ships flying across from one side of the screen to the other, the only other mode is Sequence. Having said that, this chap’s a monster and will challenge you like no other mode can by making you fly through twenty self-contained sections trying to clear all the enemies out of them within a certain time limit.

The clever thing about this is that you can thus take each section, learn their patterns much in the way you would on, say, Ikaruga, and put your knowledge to good use. You begin with a limit number of ships and bombs and the general plan is to stockpile your screen-clearers until the last possible moment, but quickly you find yourself in typical panic situations and leaving yourself disastrously short of items for the latter levels, each of which has a difficulty level so insane that you would probably be more successful trying to throw cotton through a needle eye at a distance of 100 yards. Failing one of the segments simply boosts you onto the next and hence you can actually get away with not succeeding on occasion, but even then you’re limited stock of lives means that it’ll catch up with you eventually. It’s the grand finale to a superbly entertaining six-pack of modes.

It gets so stupidly addictive that you start flying around each of the modes working out little tactics on the fly. Do you leave the warp holes open and let them suck up marauding enemies, or do you get rid of them and go for the Geoms? Do you use your bombs regularly and tot up the scores to get more later, or do you save them and hope you can twitch your way around to safety for long enough? It almost becomes a way of life, and the added incentive of some very clever achievements (zooming twice around the boundary of the level in Pacifism mode without dying being a particular favourite) it burns into your brain and won’t give you any respite.

If there is one complete that you can level at the game, it’s that online play is not available. You get little leaderboards displayed on the menu select screen so you can keep your eye on how much you’re battering your mates’ efforts by, but a bit of Xbox Live shootery would have gone down a treat. As it is, there is the option for local multiplayer with up to four of you, with co-op play and versus on offer for each game type that you’ve unlocked along the way in single player mode. There’s also a nifty little mode called Co-pilots in which one player does the moving and the other the shooting, and I can assure you that this will have you in stitches each and every time.

It’s a superb purchase, it really is. With gameplay so addictive that you could forget what the heck you were supposed to be doing for hours on end (such as writing a review, for example) and 2D visuals so bright and brash that your eyes actually feel like they’ve been doing push-ups after sustained play, you could feasibly spend your 800 Microsoft points on this and never need to play anything else for the rest of the month. As value for money it’s as good as the Live Arcade has to offer, and even though you’ll be screaming at it and throwing your controller in frustration, you always know that you’ll end up coming back time and time again for another dose. An essential purchase if ever there was one.