Biology Battle from Novaleaf is the first community game reviewed here at GDN. In case you don’t know these are the XNA games that are being developed to sell via Xbox Live. They’re mostly very small studios or single-person dev teams. I know with certainty that Biology Battle will not be the last XBLA Community game we review. Fortunately for everyone it may be one of the best.

If you’re a fan of shmups like Geometry Wars then you’ll absolutely love Biology Battle. The game takes place within a ‘living cell’ giving you the boundary of the playing area. Your task is to pilot your ship, destroy the enemy proteins and when they appear blow up the three nuclei. This is easier said than done when you consider the enemy proteins swarm at you in droves of hundreds at times. I have literally seen three hundred enemies on the screen at one time. Thankfully I had a trusty lightning power saved up or I would have been toast.

The controls are what we have come to expect from the 2D top down shoot ‘em up genre on the consoles. The left stick is for movement and the right stick is for shooting. That means you can move in one direction and shoot in the other. But Biology Battle is not about zipping around the place all willy-nilly. Precise and timely movements will win the day here. Oh and a hell of a lot of luck doesn’t hurt either. Each of the enemies moves in a particular sort of way, some come straight at you, some move away from you and some (which I personally hate) move in a somewhat erratic zig-zag loopiness that is highly irritating when you’re trying to both avoid and attack simultaneously. But that insane frustration level is what makes the game fun. Sometimes you do need to zip about haphazardly and hope for the best. Sometimes you line up hundreds of enemies and start mowing ‘em down like a field full of bowling pins.