Minecraft Fanboy

(Review by BraxtonJ on Metacritic, I couldn't phrase it better myself) -- World of Goo 2 was kind of a mixed bag for me. You can clearly see the love put into the visual and sound design, and I didn’t have any issues with the main gameplay other than some bugs (the squid-launcher thing disappeared twice for me in the final level of Atomic Express). As far as the soundtrack goes, I think it works better as background music than the first game’s, but that also means they don’t stand out nearly as much. The Brave Adventurers and Cog in the Machine remixes were the only standouts. What I was mostly looking forward to was the new story, which sadly turned out to be hugely disappointing. The first chapter sets up the “World of Goo Organization”, which fishes up a giant squid monster… for some reason. In chapter 2, you power up satellites to broadcast WOGO ads, in chapter 3 they build a light-speed train to get more goo balls, chapter 4’s a few random meta games… things are just completely random. Since each chapter has a huge time skip, anything developed before it is just thrown to the wayside. Most of the game’s cutscenes aren’t really meaningful at all, and the only consistently developed plot thread (the boy with the telescope/rocket) is kind of… just there. A significant amount of the game suggested there’d be some kind of crossover with Little Inferno, from the constant references to the games sharing the exact same snow background, but nothing really comes of it. Overall, the “plot” and dialogue seemed more like places to put random opinions and viewpoints of the developers themselves rather than at least try to connect it all together like World of Goo 1 did. I wish they had focused some (or all, really,) of the time they spent writing the slog that was the point-and-click levels on the main game’s plot. It was like the devs just added every draft the game they made without scrapping the old ones.