Review: Waves (Squidinabox)

In real life, a colossal string of digits comes with a sense of dread attached. All too often, they represent failure or obligation. Oh God, what is it now? A tax form? Another credit card bill? The  national debt clock ? In games, numbers are tamed; they work for us, not against us. They represent our capabilities, our achievements, our power. There’s nothing more satisfying to a gamer than a ludicrously high number: DPS, XP, gold, production hammers, vespene gas, you name it. The important thing is that the number representing it is gigantic, and growing as fast as possible. So my exultant response to a high-score table – that great-granddaddy of numbers in games – is practically Pavlovian by this point.

Here’s how it works: for every evil bit of geometry you dispatch in a satisfying spray of bullets, you get a point. One measly point. You’re never going to make your millions that way. But each deceased pixelated pest leaves behind an experience orb; collect enough of those, and you level up and a multiplier-boosting powerup will spawn somewhere in the cyberpunk washing-machine drum that makes up Waves’ map. So now you have a multiplier of two, and more and better enemies come crawling out of the woodwork to meet their end by your hand. Two points per kill. It’s a start, but it’s not enough. It’s time to start getting a bit flashier. So you pull out some trickier maneuvers: you get right in close to your targets before killing them, to earn the double-points point-blank bonus. You survive this palm-sweating proximity to death by using your slow-mo bullet-time ability to weave between the oncoming hordes, which conveniently also doubles the value of your kills. As you swat more enemies faster and faster, it starts getting serious: three enemies killed in a second? Have a combo multiplier for your trouble, sir.  Another three? Let me increment that multiplier again for you, sir. My word, if sir carries on at this rate, then sir will… a combo multiplier of ten? Perhaps sir would care to sample this bomb? Yeah, that’s right. Turn thirty enemies into fading splinters in the space of 10 seconds and the game gives you a bomb. You only get to keep it (and your precious, precious combo-multiplier) for as long as you maintain the combo, though, so take advantage of it while you can. And, oh my, “take advantage” is right: enemies killed with your bomb add to your combo. So if you kill 30 enemies with it, you get another one instantly, not to mention another x10 on your multiplier. Then use that to pop another 30 enemies, and… well, you get the drift. By this stage, you’re scoring hundreds, even thousands of points for each kill. Your trigger fingers are itching; your thumbs are dancing on the controller. You’re choreographing a complex and delicate ballet, snaking between hazards at the edge of the map, using your cannon like a fire-hose to douse outbreaks of enemies, building up to a bomb, then surging into the centre of the map, a thermonuclear comet detonating chains of rainbow-pulses, clearing out the level in a sparkling blossom of numbers and lights.

And all the while, that number just grows and grows. The bell rings, I start to salivate, and the neon pulses. That’s why Einstein was wrong: compound interest and all those “real world” numbers that we owe on our student loans and rent can’t captivate us like the elegant simplicity of numbers rising exponentially to multi-coloured explosions.