It's fun, and I recommend it. It fails to reach the conceptual heights of last decade's Super Mario 64, but the games it plays with gravity and perspective and make it a unique and worthwhile platformer.
Galaxy's levels are surprisingly linear. For the most part, you start at point A, and bounce along a unidirectional graph - the tiny planetoids being nodes, and the fixed flight-routes between them the edges - until you hit the flagpole star at the end.
Several levels feature branchpoints in their routes where you can go grab a "hidden" star instead of the main one, encouraging you to play that level twice. Nice, but adding an extra arm to the graph doesn't make it less graphy.
It is not an exploration game like Mario 64. Your interaction with the environment is more like a tourist than an adventurer: land somewhere, admire the scenery, do whatever's on the itinerary for this location, and then move on to the next destination. There's no need to figure out what to do or where to go next, and almost never any backtracking.
The scenery, however, is beautiful, and those itinerary tasks are all perfectly fun, usually involving nosing around a little planet collecting things and exploiting the various crazy new power-ups this game introduces.
Small gripe: the game continues the Mario-game tradition of keeping track of lives, and awarding you with extra lives for clever exploration, valiant deeds, or just collecting lots of stuff. The trouble is that lives are meaningless to a modern platformer. You start out every Galaxy play session with five lives, and playing almost any level results in a net gain of two or three more. I typically had 15 or so lives every time I was done playing. I seldom bothered to go fetch 1up mushrooms placed in tantalizing locations. It would have been nice to replace these with something more appreciable.
You should still play it (especially if you can borrow a copy like me, ha ha). Wii owners who find themselves enjoying this game owe it to themselves to also check out the orginal Super Mario 64, which can be purchased and downloaded for $10 from the Wii Shop channel.
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