Deflector is a very late-game level that makes the best of a new foe that bounces back and forth off the walls by sticking dozens of them into a small space with lots of spinning pinball flippers.

The further you go, the better Lucid gets at playing with the bits and pieces as its disposal, in fact. What new enemies there are tend to slide neatly into the ecology, however.) (Lucid's generally happy to leave Bizarre's existing cast of flockers and baiters in place, focusing its energy on landscapes that evolve over time or are riddled with shifting obstacles. Elsewhere, there's a glorious blend of Pacifism, Frogger and Every Extend, which has you dodging streams of fast-moving enemies and touching off mines laid by a weird little amoeba. My favourite level is probably Infected, in which geometrical shapes bubble and multiply across a confined Petri dish arena leaving you fighting for space. Regardless of this, when the game's more gimmicky ideas work, Lucid often has something special on its hands. The shift to 3D arenas looks striking, but it isn't particularly tricky to get your head around: Super Stardust has done some of this stuff before, and the original Geo Wars always offered a playing field that was bigger than the screen anyway, getting you used to the idea of limited sight-lines. Alongside levels that borrow existing ideas like King and Pacifism, there are stages where nasty little Zambonis rumble around incrementally painting the landscape, and stages that get narrower and narrower as you play. Many of them have their own conceits, too. Some of them come with bespoke arenas, warping the flat plains of the classic games into 3D peanuts and pitcher's mounds and cough drops. The main offering here is an adventure suite built of dozens of unlockable stages. With a campaign to fill, Lucid's opted for gimmicks rather than modes, and a lot of the time this actually works better than you might expect. Bosses are a nice addition, folding nicely into the wave-based structure. Lucid captures Geo Wars' sense of movement well - that feeling of gliding through thick air. Retro Evolved 2 kept the no-mess high-score mentality in place, but it twisted the central mechanics of moving and blasting into a variety of clever new modes. This being video games, Bizarre itself came back for a second swing, and it's interesting to see how the developers handled that. You can't really improve on that, just as you can't really improve on the template that Bizarre Creations laid down, taking the wonderfully jittery twin-stick shooting of Robotron and rendering it smooth and cool and gleamingly abstract. Euclid pointed out the major snag 2000 years ago, in fact, when he defined a line (I had to look this quote up) as 'breadthless length'.

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