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The peaks of domed areas and the corners of cuboids can offer powerful, king-of-the-castle advantages if you can hold them, but are also incredibly high-risk areas due to their reduced visibility of the overall warzone. The spiralling playfulness of GW3’s level design changes everything. It’s an incredible, immensely gratifying feeling. Those always-troublesome rows of orange rockets are terrifying the first time their formation spreads to stretch around a spherical play area, but once you realise that, logically, they have to come back together at the other side? You can dodge, fire a salvo behind yourself at the opportune moment, and know – without even looking - that they’re not coming back around to bother you a second time. You’ll start to discover radically new, deeply satisfying sides to – and interactions with – the series’ traditional enemy AI types. You’ll find that a boss enemy’s bubble-shield isn’t actually an annoyance, but a strategic, environmental opportunity, its chaotic, 180-degree deflections bathing the grid with cleansing gunfire more effectively than you ever could on your own.
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Not long after, you’ll start to realise the true power and potency of GW’s new set-up. You’ll be giddily impressed the first time you fire a stream of shots to the other side of a gleaming, glitterball moon, or spin around on the corner of a cube, showering three sides of it with a rainstorm of glowing gunfire. This is precise 2D gameplay exploded to take in boggling, free-wheeling, 3D strategies.
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