Geometry Dash
NOTE: This article needs to be updated to coincide with the release of Update 2.2
Geometry Dash (commonly reffered as GD or GMD) is a series of music platform games created by Robert "RobTop" Topala, the founder of the Swedish independent development studio RobTop Games. The player controls as an icon to navigate along music-based levels, while avoiding obstacles such as spikes that instantly destroy the icon on impact.
List of video games
Year | Game | Platforms |
---|---|---|
2013 | Geometry Dash | Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, |
2014 | Geometry Dash Lite | Android, iOS, Windows Phone |
2015 | Geometry Dash Meltdown | Android, iOS |
2016 | Geometry Dash World | Android, iOS |
2017 | Geometry Dash SubZero | Android, iOS |
Why They'll Push Your Skills To The Limit
- The biggest highlight here would be the soundtrack. The OST is packed with bangers that are worth a listen. You got music that is a lot to mention on this very page.
- Not to mention At the Speed of Light, composed by Dimain47, won for the most popular soundtrack in the community, being used in popular demon levels such as Cataclysm, Bloodbath, and Bloodlust. The artist himself was impressed with it's usage.
- Great 2D colorful graphics and art style that can be considered eye candy.
- The full game is very affordable. It costs $1.99 on iOS and Android while the Steam version costs $3.99. Don't feel like paying, you can try out Geometry Dash Lite which is free. The best part about the Lite version is that you can transfer certain unlockable data over to the full version through user accounts!
- Plus, the mobile version has no microtransactions or advertisements!
- You can get the expansions for free. They come with Geometry Dash Meltdown, Geometry Dash World, and Geometry Dash SubZero each with exclusive levels.
- The gameplay here is simple to understand. All you need is a touchscreen, keyboard, mouse, or controller (depending on the platform). All you got to do is let your icon reach the end of the level as well as jump through a series of obstacles. Challenging yet fun.
- The challenge here is the rhythm. You can't control the speed of your gameplay. The key part of this would be how time and rhythm play a role here. You have to learn when to respond at the right time of your actions if you want to complete the level and that's the point of this game.
- They are eight types of characters to use with each having a different interaction.
- The Cube (green) is the default character whereas you tap to jump from the ground and hold your jump command to make repeated jumps.
- The Ship (magenta) is used to let players hold to move up and release to move down.
- The Ball (red) can switch between gravity on solid surfaces.
- The UFO (orange) lets players tap to jump in mid-air.
- The Wave (cyan) sharply moves up and down diagonally, similar to the ship.
- The Robot (silver) can let players hold to make a long jump from the ground and just release to stop the jump.
- The Spider (purple) can flip gravity and teleport to the nearest floor or ceiling.
- The Swing Copter (yellow) works like a combination of the ship and ball, with the player tapping to flip gravity while in mid-air.
- Portals exist in the game. They are used to switch between characters, reverse the direction of gravity, change the size of the character, mirror the direction of their movement, or change the speed of your character. This is for challenge and variety.
- Another thing is that pads and orbs give players the ability to jump automatically or mid-air. You also got more orbs like dash orbs (the player can hold instead of tapping) for instance.
- 22 official levels in the original version with 19 of them having to be unlocked via installation. Each level gives rewards upon completion and contains 3 secret coins as a method to unlock the three locked levels. The official levels have a crazy amount of difficulty levels which are easy, normal, hard, harder, insane, and demon.
- Speaking of collectibles, Diamonds are also collected in your game. You can use them as a contribution towards unlocking icons and achievements. Even two of the shops. You can get diamonds by daily chests, daily quests, beating the weekly demon, the treasure room, playing gauntlets, and making forward progress.
- Some custom levels have a difficulty that is determined by Topala. The creator of a given level, its players, and the game's moderators can influence this decision.
- Practice mode helps out players see what the level is like before jumping into the real thing. It's good for those who want to do well and expect what lies in the level. These practice levels let players reset manually or automatically place checkpoints. However, you can't officially complete the level in practice mode.
- Stars are given in levels. A Demon level gives you 14 or 15 stars while user-made levels that classify as Demon tier and give you 10 stars.
- Achievements are built in this game. There are a lot of them you can aim for and can reward you with stuff like icons or colors.
- The in-game currency used here is taken in the form of mana orbs. The orbs are useful to get some stuff at the shop including characters, effects, colors, and stuff made by the Geometry Dash community.
- Daily Rewards are rewards that can be obtained daily. Depending on the chest, you can get collectibles with the large chest being the best one. There's also a free stuff button that makes players see three chests containing icons that can be unlocked by following the given YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook links. The button will disappear once all chests have been opened.
- As of 2.1, we got Gauntlets which has a selection of five user levels of similar yet increasing difficulty. Completing a gauntlet rewards you with diamonds, mana orbs, shards, icons, and other special items.
- You can purchase the Chamber of Time from the secret shop. By entering specific phrases, rewards like achievements can be unlocked. A series of riddles in the green text can appear between any general response in the following order to help guess the codes.
- Yet another secret. You got to complete the secret level called The Challenge to get The Basement. You will see three colored locks that require a key to use. After all three locks have been removed, the bars will descend from the cell and free the Demon Guardian. The Demon Guardian disappears in a flash of light leaving in its place a large chest including a purple key for the Demon Gauntlet.
- Customize your own character. Plenty of options to choose from including colors and a variety of icons.
- If you were to get 5 keys, you can go to the Treasure Room. This is a room where it contains chests with each of them requiring keys to open. Plenty of rewards for you! Later updates have rooms that require even more keys per chest.
- Lots of collectibles to collect. They are a major component for Geometry Dash.
- Get 50 Diamonds to unlock the Vault of Secrets. Pressing the button will cycle through a series of responses and clear any input in the text field. Certain phrases can unlock rewards and achievements. For instance, typing in 'seven' will unlock an icon that resembles Finn from Adventure Time.
- Levels of the Week are basically daily levels that players may compete just to earn some Diamonds depending on the level of difficulty. Upon completion, the player will gain a certain amount of Diamonds as a bonus as well as the Diamonds gained from simply completing the level. Weekly Demon is also another one of those daily levels.
- Speaking of levels, Level Editor is present! You can create your own levels and share them online with other people. Custom songs can be used for your levels in the Newgrounds Audio Portal. The levels have difficulty levels and there are 12 of them.
- One thing to note is that you can download levels other people made.
- 2.2 introduces the platformer mode, which has the player control their icon using left and right movements and jumping, allowing for more creative concepts. There's also the Tower, which are four levels created by RobTop himself so the viewer understands how the mode works.
- Overall, this game is packed with loads of features, levels, and achievements that can keep the player occupied for as long as a lifetime, with lots of new community creations coming out every single day.
Bad Qualities
- Meltdown has some false advertising. Robert Topala said that there would be "five" brand new and free levels in Geometry Dash Meltdown yet only three were released. Though there is a coming soon screen with text stating "There will be more levels, but are you prepared?"
- Another instance of false advertising. Would be the ship appearing in the cover image of Meltdown yet you can't unlock it.
- Some levels can be epileptic for a lot of people, the infamous examples being the official level Electrodynamix and a series which reminds of a custom level "Nine Circles" by Zobros. Combining with the frustrating difficulty spike, it can be a severe pain in the head in most of times.
- Although nowhere near as popular, the worst examples of this are Decrescendo by Titanium (a disliked demon with a ship that flashes very quickly), Stereo Madness v4 (the whole level is just a Stereo Madness remake with flashes) or iSpyWithMyLittleEye by Voxicat, which the full level is full of epileptic scenes, thankfully, there's a warning.
- The game hasn't received any major update since January 2017 (despite the minor 2.11 update which came in November), however a trailer for 2.2 update was uploaded to YouTube on August 14, 2021 by RobTop for the 8th anniversary. 2.2 was then released on December 19, 2023.
- Many portals, spikes, blocks and such became useless over time. For example, the mirror portals have never been used again since Electroman Adventures (although it returns in GD World's Striker only and Subzero's Nock Em, albeit unseen).
- Missed opportunities (although most of them likely/100% will be added in 2.2):
- You cannot customize the controls in settings;
- A lack of music used in the level in Practice Mode (however, it is possible with third-party tools as MegaHack);
- The game isn't localized for countries like Russia, Spain, Germany or France, although the text is easy to understand.
- The amount of frames per second matter really much, especially with some mods as Ship;
- Parental Control is absolutely pointless by giving only 3 opportunities: only Featured levels, disable account comments/level comments;
- To be honest, early mentioned Practice Mode is really broken, let alone Preview Mode in the editor because its physics are incorrect to in-level (which are far from being perfect anyway).
- Abysmal amount of glitches with most of them being addressed to gameplay/load process/editor/save system from non-serious or even becoming classics to players (as incorrect physics on high refresh rate as 360 fps/NoClip barrier (NoClip is a hack that makes player go through spikes, but stops with solids)) to making GD more unfair to play or even DELETING ALL CREATED LEVELS FOR NO REASON. This video by Stormy clearly shows how broken the game is by having 312 known bugs and how overlooked some issues are.
- As RobTop (the developer) said, a lot of bugs are going to be fixed, but seeing that, it's easy to say that 2.2 will offer more.
- Another glitch is that in the mobile version since the 2.1 update, the music is out of sync with the level by a split second on certain devices.
- Some online levels have incorrect rates (Auto-Insane ones; demons are easier to be changed, but even with that, 5 ranks isn't enough).
- Although a reason for that could be that the creators buffed their levels to make them harder (examples include ShakeN by PaLiX or Liquid Containers by TheRaptor999).
- Although only for Auto and Easy levels, another reason is that no matter how hard the level is, if the level is below medium length and it gets rated it automatically defaults to one of those 2 ratings.
- Game's optimization is a joke since a lot of user levels usually lag even on mid-tier devices because players place 40-60k+ objects in their levels (and even worse with levels that have 100-200k+, which can simply crash the game). This has been prominent since the 2.0 era.
- Graphical customization settings are available in the Steam version, but not the mobile version, which is inexcusable given that most user levels nowadays consume more hardware power.
Reception
Geometry Dash
The game has received positive reviews from critics for its style and gameplay. 148Apps gave the game a positive review stating "Geometry Dash provides all of the challenge expected from an "impossible" game while also making it more accessible to newcomers." On the App Store, Geometry Dash was ranked 2nd for the app's Top 10 Paid iPad Games and 7th for Top 10 Paid iPhone Games in 2018.
Other games
For Geometry Dash World, GameZebo praised the game's captivation and decent gameplay styles.
Trivia
- The game was originally going to be called Geometry Jump. It is still internally named as that in the mobile version.
- While most of the soundtrack is from Newgrounds, that excludes the vault/shop theme sounds, as they're by Kevin MacLeod and can be only downloaded on his Incompetech website.
- On the main menu, normal or mini icons of any customized combination will travel past randomly. They can be selected, which will destroy them, and in some cases, unlocks achievements.
- All main levels start with a cube sequence, excluding certain World levels.
- The levels' soundtrack is mainly by Canadian/European artists (especially those in the Nordic countries). This excludes Boom Kitty, the artist behind Power Trip (the third level in Subzero), who is from Seattle, WA.
- All levels are named after their songs excluding Fingerdash, which has Fingerbang by MDK. It was most likely renamed due to the original name being inappropriate.
- The mobile versions of Geometry Dash along with the other games in the series used to have integration with Everyplay (a service where users could record and upload videos), but it was discontinued on October 1, 2018.
- It was inspired by The Impossible Game which also has cube gameplay mechanics. The difference is that The Impossible Game only has a cube sequence and started out as an Xbox Live game, while GD on the other hand, has various characters other than just the cube and started out as a mobile game.
- The game took four months to develop.