Metavaxx Reviews

A truly great game design is one that makes someone wonder how they haven't seen a game like this before. Shooters often require players to surgically weave between enemy projectiles, but they allow you to spray wildly if it allows you to survive. Precision in those games comes from memorizing enemy formations to maximize scoring. In Metavaxx, that's turned on its head - all twenty-five of these levels were hand-designed, with some of the largest having truly bizarre shapes for pieces that really make you slow down to examine which piece is touching more than the number of infected cells it displays. You'll have to work your agent deep into these narrow crevices, which really drives the point of the game's emphasis on surgical precision. There's so much tension in blowing up the wrong cell and then scrambling and weaving back out so you don't get clobbered by the twenty viruses that go everywhere, trying not to get swallowed up by sulfur fumes or by oxygen bubbles. As much as the game stresses you to learn which cells are and aren't infected, some are entirely locked in by other cells, making fights inevitable. My only complaint of the game is that while the concept of choosing one of six different manufacturers for the vaccine is interesting, only half of them seem valid. If you're a good enough player at figuring out where the infected cells are, then one of the manufacturers becomes useless, the one that gives you the chemical marker. Another one gives you a 100% power increase but with the tradeoff of no cells being marked with numbers at all, which works against the entire point of the game. I'm amazed at the enemy variety from just ten different molecules, since sometimes they can come out as big a cluster as eight pieces, so you could have one that briefly puts up a shield when attacked, aggressively pursues you when attacked, and then explodes in sulfur when defeated, which can be a nightmare in cramped spaces. There's enough variety in the evolutions to keep gameplay interesting, too, they make for the easiest achievements. This is a really cool game overall, I can't recommend it enough, and just like the infection, I've been spreading the word about this game to get more people to check it out.