There's a point that comes when playing a truly great game when the world slips away, the feeling of the controller in your hands is gone, the part of your brain that acknowledges what your doing as a game flips off and you feel every moment in game as a reaction, sudden, alive and free. No game gives you this sense of adrenaline-fueled twitch reaction better than Geometry Wars 2.
Geometry Wars takes the retro game credo of simplicity and perfects it. The goal is simple, score as many points as possible without letting the shapes touch you. You use one stick to move and the other to shoot, the right trigger releases a screen clearing bomb and thats it. GW2 owes a lot to retro games with its simplicity of controls but this simply isn't astroids in High-Definition, theres a layer of complexity underneath the hood that gives GW2 its intrinsically addictive style.
Each shape that comes after you in Geometry Wars follows its own strange geometric path. There are shapes that move only in the X and Y axis in straight lines, there are shapes that spin and move slow, there are shapes that are drawn to you as if by magnets but of the 12 enemies in the game no two move alike. When you get far enough into the games Evolved mode and there are enemies appearing from every corner of the map in droves you feel like you're part of intricate math problem instead of a game.
Though you don't think about Geometry Wars 2 like you think about a math problem. GW2 is a game about refelxes and a ludicrous mix of pure skill and dumb luck. Weaving your tiny ship through walls of enemies, spraying in every direction like a blind, is a truly harrowing experience unlike anything else in video games.
And that's what makes GW2 the best, so many other games do so much to create that feeling of futility, the adrenaline rush that comes with one against many, but while those games get caught up cover mechanic or dual-wielding combinations, GW2 keeps it simple and boils it down to the pure feeling of overcoming the impossible.
I haven't even touched on the games breadth of amazing game modes, its eye shattering graphics or its perfect integration into xbox live (me and my friends have ridiculous feuds over who can get the top score in King mode) but thats because what makes GW2 the best is the gameplay that feels at once simplistic and infinitely complex. And as Leonardo Divinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."