Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved PC PLUS+

PC Plus builds on saulob's excellent PC port. It's not emulation: the game's own code runs natively, with high frame rates, high resolutions and modern options. PC Plus adds the things I missed playing it on a PC, especially with a keyboard and mouse.

Download the latest release · Join the Discord to share scores and custom modes, and hear about new versions first.

What PC Plus adds

• Real mouse aim. Shots go straight to the cursor, instantly, like a modern twin-stick shooter. Right-click bombs, Escape pauses. A controller still plays the original way.
• An animated neon crosshair that spins and pinches as you fire, so it never gets lost in the chaos.
• Keyboard prompts and a keyboard and mouse controls screen, drawn in the game's own style.
• Online leaderboards. Pick a player name and the game's Everyone boards show PC Plus players from around the world.
• Nearby players, in place of Xbox Live friends. Each mode lists the players just above and below you, and while you play, the corner shows the next score to beat, moving up as you pass each one.
• Pick your colour. Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, Gold, Rainbow or any colour you like, for the menus, HUD, icons and crosshair, right from the game's Settings menu.
• A results screen after every single-player run, inspired by Pac-Man CE DX: your score over time with deaths, bombs and your best moment marked, the enemies you destroyed, and what your black holes and gates were worth. It sits over the Game Over screen and never slows a retry.
• Watch your runs again. Every single-player run is saved as a replay, and Watch replays, in the panel left of the main menu, plays them back exactly, at any frame rate. Star the ones you love to keep them. A replay never counts: no score, stats or achievements.
• Watch the top runs. Watch replays has an Online tab: every leaderboard's top 50, and any run with a replay plays from there, or from Watch Replay on the game's own leaderboard screen. It opens on the run just above yours. When your best makes a top 50, its replay is shared too; Share my top runs as replays in the launcher turns that off.
• Make your own modes. Custom modes, in the panel right of the main menu, plays the game's modes with new rules: no gates, a score that's how long you survive, more or fewer lives and bombs, endless bombs, a time limit, faster or slower play. Five come with it (Pure Pacifism, Overdrive, One Life, Bomb Party and Speed Test), and making your own is a small text file in user_data/mods: see docs/MODDING.md. Custom runs keep their own bests and replays, and never count for leaderboards, achievements or unlocks.
• Master Deadline and Master Evolved. One life, and the only help is a bonus bomb at 100K, 1M, 10M and 100M. Press RB (or 3 on the keyboard) on the Single Player screen to turn to the Master page. Both are always open and have their own online leaderboards, and their leaderboard opens from the Master page.
• Every mode open from the start. No unlocking, no "Game mode unlocked!" and no first-time rules screens: this one is for veterans.
• Deadline's hidden spawn rank, if you want it. Turn on Deadline rank info and the HUD shows K (weighted kills), G (geoms) and the rank the next wave will set, with a little pop when a wave raises it. Off by default; it only shows information, so runs still count online.
• A launcher that looks like Geometry Wars, and PC PLUS+ on the title screen.

From the original port

saulob's port does the heavy lifting, and all of it is still here:

• Frame rates up to 240 or unlimited, with the game still running at its original speed
• Up to 4x render resolution (5120×2880), ultrawide and other aspect ratios, FXAA and MSAA
• All 12 achievements, local scores and progression, no Xbox Live needed
• Optional cheats, controller vibration and keyboard remapping
• A launcher that installs the game from your own package, and updates itself
• An experimental native Linux build, which you can build from source for now (see below)

Screenshots

Custom modes. Each one opens with its name and rules.

Nearby players. The people closest to your score, in every mode.

Your next rival. The corner shows the score to beat, and moves up the moment you pass it.

Your colour. Help and options, Settings, Colour.

The Nearby board, in place of Friends.

Choose your player name. The launcher asks once.

Getting started

You need: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) with a DirectX 12 graphics card, the latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (x64), and your own copy of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 for Xbox Live Arcade (game version 0.0.1.2).

1. Download the zip from the latest release and extract it anywhere you can write to.
2. Run geometry_wars_retro_evolved_2.exe. The launcher opens.
3. On the Play page, click Install from package... and pick your game package. It's one file with a long hexadecimal name and no extension; on an Xbox 360 drive it's in Content\0000000000000000\584108FF\000D0000\.
4. When it says Ready to play, press PLAY.

The build isn't digitally signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn the first time: choose More info, then Run anyway.

Updating: use the launcher's update, or extract a new release over your current folder.

Your saves live in a user_data folder next to the program, so each copy of the game has its own. Keep playing from the same folder, and copy the whole folder to move to another PC.

On a laptop, or the frame rate is low? In the launcher, open Graphics and set Render path to Fast. On Intel graphics the game otherwise uses a much slower path. If anything then looks wrong, set it back to Automatic. Lowering Internal render resolution to 50% can help too. Run benchmark, at the bottom of the same page, plays the same one-minute replay on every PC and copies the result, so you can share it on the Discord and compare.

Handy keys: F11 switches between windowed and fullscreen, F2 shows the frame rate, F7 opens achievements, F10 opens cheats. Hold Shift while starting to bring back the launcher if you've hidden it.

Online leaderboards and privacy

Online leaderboards are on, but nothing is sent until you choose a player name (the launcher asks once; you can say Not now). After that, each finished run sends your player name, score, what you played with (mouse, keyboard or controller) and the game version. Runs with cheats on are never sent. There's no account, and no email or IP address is kept. Delete my online scores on the launcher's Gameplay page removes everything you've sent, and turning Online leaderboards off keeps everything local.

Your name can appear on other players' screens as one of the players near their score. Scores come from players' own PCs, so these are community boards for fun, not a tournament.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/omenhachi/geometry-wars-2-pc-plus.git

Reporting problems

If the game won't start or crashes, please open an issue with the newest geometry_wars_retro_evolved_2_*.log from the logs folder, and say what you were doing when it happened. You can also ask on the Discord.

Credits

• saulob, for the original PC port that PC Plus is built on: the recompilation, runtime patches, launcher, installer, offline Xbox Live, high frame rates and much more
• Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 by Bizarre Creations, published by Microsoft Game Studios (2008). This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by them or any rights holder, and it contains none of their files.
• ReXGlue SDK for the recompiler and runtime (BSD 3-Clause)
• TRG Launcher for the launcher interface (pinned at v1.1.0; that revision has no explicit license file)
• The launcher and installer follow the Hard Corps: Uprising and Earthworm Jim HD PC ports
• The licenses of the libraries in the release are in the licenses folder of the zip

AI disclosure: AI tools were used to assist with code analysis, development, debugging and documentation, and changes were directed, tested and reviewed by the maintainer. The PC Plus additions were developed with Claude (Anthropic) and play-tested by me.

License

Original code in this project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 only (GPL-2.0-only); see LICENSE. Third-party components keep their own licenses: see ReXGlue-LICENSE.txt and THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt. No game files are included, and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and its assets are not covered by this project's license.