I've been playing Every Extend Extra Extreme on and off for a few days now. As far as XBLA titles go, I generally enjoy the simple little titles I get and consider them to be a great value. For easily-accessible, simple-yet-intriguing games, you're usually in pretty good shape as long as you understand and appreciate the type of games typically distributed. Most of these games have a few very strong points that carry your interest and they build on these strengths to develop into a good 'casual' title.
When I sat down to play Every Extend Extra Extreme, I didn't know much about it. I'd heard it was a shooter... of a sort... You have a ship that has to dodge enemies, but only until you're in a good position to blow yourself apart, taking down as many as you can. OK I've been here before right? I liked Burnout's "Crash Mode" so this could be similar. I also really enjoyed Geometry Wars, so dodging 2D enemies can be fun too.
The gameplay itself turned out to be nothing like either game mentioned above. When you're in-game, you're looking at a black screen where you move your compass-like 'ship' around in 2D. There's techno music playing and a meter on the bottom of the screen that pulses to the beat of the songs. Very soon, enemies move onto the screen, but don't seem to chase you, they're just passing through. After you've dodged them a bit, you'll find yourself surrounded, which is actually a good thing because that means it's time to press "A" and blow yourself up. Your explosion causes your enemies to explode, and their explosion blows up their buddies. If you did it well, this turns into a large chain-reaction explosion that goes on for quite a while. When the chain of explosions is over, your ship respawns with an invulnerability shield. This shield allows you to zoom around and collect power-ups dropped from your chain of explosions and position yourself in a good spot to take down more enemies. The game actually plays a lot like a casual game called Boomshine that circulated the internet a while back.
I can't say that I was immediately enthralled. My first impression of the game was that I played for 5-8 seconds, and watched what happened for the 20-30 seconds to follow-- yes, if you're really good, you wont actually 'play' the game much at all, you'll just watch the chain. I had the basics down, but there had to be more depth to the game right? Well, yeah, there's a little more. Each power-up does something different, there's shield-extend, faster enemy spawn, speed boost, and time extension. But it doesn't really mean that you should learn them, because you'll grab most of them while your shield is active anyway. I figured that couldn't be the real hook of the game, so I moved on to the next most obvious part...
The meter at the bottom pulses to the beat of the song, and your score will be much higher if you blow your ship up on a beat (when the meter is full) rather than whenever you feel like it. This doesn't really add any difficulty to the game, because the songs have fairly quick beats, but I finally realized that what it does manage to do is add to the *experience*.
Every Extend Extra Extreme is definitely more about the visual and audio experience more than it is about gameplay. The enemies and their explosions are a very colorful feast for your eyes. Fans of games like Fantavision will be pleased with what they see. For your ears, you'll notice that if you blow your ship up on-beat, the resulting rumbles add a percussive backup to the music being played.
This game has four modes of what I consider "gameplay" and one "extra" mode.
In Unlimited, you have a countdown clock that you extend by obtaining power-ups from the enemies you take down. This adds a bit of strategy to the game in that will often have to cancel a long chain so you can pick up more time-extensions. Unlimited games can easily extend longer than an hour.
Limited mode is basically the same as unlimited, but you have a fixed time-limit to get the highest score you can. There are 10, 15, and 20 minute time modes.
A third mode, titled "Wiz Ur Muzik," is basically just unlimited mode but it uses music that you have stored on your 360 and you have a few different options you can use to sync the rhythm of the music to what's happening on-screen.
The fourth mode is the most gameplay you'll find in E4. It is more of a traditional shooter, your ship has guns and you have to dodge lots of pretty particles emitted to the beat of the music. It's actually a really fun shooter and the music helps to bring you in to the experience.
Every Extend Extra Extreme is an interesting product and one that is fairly hard for me to bring you to a decisive conclusion. It's definitely an experience different from what you'll usually find on XBLA. If you're looking for depth of gameplay, you should probably look elsewhere, but if you like an Audio/Visual "experience," then give this a shot.
