World Of Goo 2 review: A creative spin on goo with some flies in the ointment

The first World Of Goo was a joyful parade of goo engineering with a never-ending sense of novelty (it actually didn’t end for about four hours). Each level offered a new type of goo that challenged you to get a bunch of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe, or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle. World Of Goo 2 continues that sense of novelty with as much nervous enthusiasm as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goo at the player to keep you on your mud-caked toes. But that quest doesn’t always result in delightful new levels. There’s a hit-and-miss feel to everything this time around. But those hits has hits. To anyone who's spent the last 16 years longing for stickier builds: I hope you like hilariously unpredictable liquids.

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As before, the goal of each level is to deliver a certain number of sticky balls to a distant pipe, usually suspended in the sky or suspended in a dangerous gap on one side of the screen. With clever use of different stickies, you'll build dangerous suspension bridges and swinging towers to “rescue” as many little blobs as possible. If you beat a certain time limit or use a limited number of moves, you can earn a special reward and also save as many of the sticky kids as possible.

But things are rarely as simple as Bridge Constructor. Your building materials are googly-eyed freaks, and they don't come from a single species. Some of the gooey balls from the first game are back, like the flammable matchstick-headed gooey balls that cause fiery chain reactions. Or the reusable green Velcro-tied gooey balls. Balloons are back too, their buoyancy helping to stabilize your crane-like creations (“fixed” is a relative term).

A group of golf ball pieces are thrown into the air near a lava pit.

A large mass of jelly is slowly crushed by the thorns.

A lump of jelly-like substance is being destroyed in a rotating shredder.

A ball spits goo onto a slowly expanding pink structure.

Image credit: Rock Paper Rifle / Tomorrow Company

But many other goos are new. There's translucent “channel” goos that act like hollow straws to lick up and take in any liquid they touch (more on these in a moment). There's cheesy yellow goos that can form a solid surface; pink goos that grow and stretch when you wet them with liquid; grotesque “just add water” toys. And the opposite, pale blue goos that slowly shrink when wet, creating structures that collapse in on themselves like a bag of chips melting on a campfire. In the fourth act of the game, some weird stuff happens that essentially turns the game into a series of goo-based jokes. Before you know it, you're playing with gravity, golf balls, and the species itself.

But the real puzzle provider here is fluid simulation. Pools of black liquid need to be licked up and turned into snotty balls. Streams need to be channeled with tiny water-ball squid heads. Some fluids will power repulsor-mouthed beings that propel seas, snotty boats, or balloon-powered jet packs. Fiery lava presents its own problems (and sometimes solutions).

A tilted crane suspended by balloons over dangerous lava.

Image credit: Rock Paper Rifle / Tomorrow Company

The Buckaroo-stacking of puzzle materials is both impressive and sometimes a little overwhelming. While one player may enjoy stacking different goo on top of each other, another player may feel like the opportunity is being wasted, harboring a vision for a game with twice as many levels, that makes fuller and more focused use of all the goo-based possibilities. But that's not the puzzle game 2D Boy is interested in making. It's as fast-paced and playful as the first game, and just as obsessed with rapid-fire reinvention. To say there's too much innovation in World Of Goo 2 is like going to the soft play area and complaining that there are too many colors in the ball pit.

So yes, the increasingly absurd sense of stakes is still intact, even thematically. Levels move from serene islands to stormy sunsets and stormy nights, hundreds of thousands of years passing from one chapter to the next. Meanwhile, the music builds from delicate flamenco guitar to epic horn blasts and apocalyptic choral chants, giving each chapter an anthemic sense of progression that pairs perfectly with the increasing complexity (or madness) of the sticky puzzles. It’s an upward launch into clouds of sticky madness that will feel familiar to anyone who stacked sticky blocks or talked to a sentient search engine in the first game.

People with children in strollers stand in front of a billboard and say: "Let's go shopping!"

Image credit: Rock Paper Rifle / Tomorrow Company

The developer’s characteristic light satire is also in full swing. The World Of Goo Corporation is being rebranded, and an early cutscene sees humanity rushing to shop “sustainably” (but not before its children have thrown their plastic bottles to the ground). The game’s wry signage returns, too, at one point claiming that erect pink goo with its throbbing veins is perfectly normal. “An alternative interpretation of the natural behaviour of growing balls is neither intended nor intended to be inferred,” declares one sign, dismissing penile tissue altogether.

They all make for a good time. But then there are those “sucks” I mentioned. Not every level is a joy. For me, the worst offenders are the timed levels, like one with a timer in a pipe that counts down until hot lava is ready to gush out and destroy your snot. Or another that counts down until the pipe has released its useful fluid and the fluid has stopped pumping. I'm not convinced that these forced timed challenges feel right in a game that's otherwise happy to let you play at your own pace. They seem designed to add some pressure, but rather than make me move quickly, they end up creating a level where at least one restart is expected. I was similarly annoyed by levels where your light sources are limited, or where your environment is constantly moving, where the challenge is to build a structure but the structure itself doesn't remain static. Yes, part of the appeal of this game comes from the thinness of its global building material. But for me, there comes a point where tinkering becomes frustrating. Then, it's a blessing that you can skip any level without any consequences.

Three slime cannons fire slime from one column to the next.

Image credit: Rock Paper Rifle / Tomorrow Company

There are other annoying bits. The WASD keys control the camera, but when your cursor is close to the edge, the screen automatically scrolls, and there's no option to turn this off. So if the place you want to click is close to the edge, the camera sometimes moves a slight but significant distance at exactly the wrong time. On top of that, the whiteflies that acted as the “undo” button in the first game do return, but their mosquito-like movements around the screen make them really hard to click. They also mostly stay close to the edge of the screen, meaning that when you hover your cursor over them, the edge scrolling kicks back in – aghgghhhh! It's the video game equivalent of trying to follow a link in your browser, and the HTML website scrolls down the entire thing as soon as you click. I suspect World Of Goo 2 was probably designed to be great for touchscreen tablets and other touchscreen devices, but it can feel awkward with a mouse and keyboard. A simple backspace key to pop a fly (wherever it is) would eliminate most of this friction. Maybe they'll patch this along with the edge-of-screen disable. Possible!

A large fish creature with many eyes opens its mouth towards the sky, while a structure falls inside.

Image credit: Rock Paper Rifle / Tomorrow Company

It would certainly fix everything. I spent twice as much time in a satisfying, engineer-esque “LEGO” trance as I did sucking my teeth on this sequel. Some of the frustrations feel intentional – the whole trick of the game is a certain amount of unpredictability. Your components are never 100% reliable (they're made of jelly, of course), and the physics simulation is as much at the mercy of gravity alone as it is of wild liquid or slime balls. In that sense, the misclicks and clumsy balls (oo-er) in World Of Goo 2 exist as stray annoyances, and the clumsy levels – as much as they annoyed me – exist as a byproduct of an ingenuity that produces great moments elsewhere.

The biggest concern for anyone eagerly awaiting this sequel (hi Graham) is that it doesn’t live up to the wild creativity of the original. And I can confidently confirm that’s not an issue for Goo 2. If you’re after another silly ride down a lazy river of black sludge, then skip it. The sludge is good.

This review is based on the game review structure provided by the developer.

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