Up until the Wii came along, and turned the gaming world upside down, there were few games that really held all that much weight with your average Joe in the street. But while games were still in their infancy, a few small titles were lighting a path for the Wii and the DS today - reaching a mainstream market, by championing the principals of accessibility and fun. Ask anyone of a certain generation to name a game, and the chances are they'll answer Tetris. Ask them to name another, and you wouldn't be surprised if they came back with Space Invaders.
And so, you may imagine that that same person would be quite excited to hear that there's a new Space Invaders game out on the Xbox Live Arcade. The only problem is, this isn't the same beast they once knew. In fact, bar the odd similarly shaped alien, and the fact you're in a ship, firing projectiles at enemies on the screen, the similarities stop there. Gone are the lines of aliens, casually moving from left to right; gone is the feeling of inevitable destruction, as the aliens slowly made their way down the screen; and, sadly, gone also is the ease of pick up and play. Space Invaders: Infinity Gene is a game designed for the hardest of hardcore - the twitchy finger, bullet dodging collective who pride themselves on finishing a game like this in a single sitting, without using a life. Incidentally, there's an achievement in here for doing just that.
Believe it or not, this is one of the simpler levels.
Although we're relatively experienced at these kind of things, we weren't exactly expecting to ace Infinity Gene in our first sitting, but we still struggled more than we'd hoped. Getting a game over every few levels isn't much fun - especially when it seems the game's often working actively against you.
Fast, furious, and frenetic, within seconds, the screen often turns into a blitz of enemies, bullets and in some levels, obstacles that you'll have to try and avoid. You'll need incredible peripheral vision, and razor sharp reactions to actually get anywhere, as literally one wrong move will leave you dead. As the screen fills with bullets, enemies, and everything else that comes in-between, you'll be left simply holding the A button down, and hugging the bottom of the screen for dear life, as you pray the literal hundreds of enemies somehow manage to miss you.
Don't... move...
One area where Space Invaders: Infinity Gene improves on the original is in terms of variety. With different enemies having different attacks and abilities, you'll quickly learn to prioritise the enemies that will lead most rapidly to a game over. One particularly annoying enemy draws an indestructible line across the screen, and unless you shoot the small circular ship that's projecting it, it'll slide down the field towards you, and wipe you out within seconds. The problem is, when you're dodging fire from every which way at the same time, it isn't exactly easy to navigate your way through the bullet field towards the enemy that's predicting your impending doom - and the minimalistic graphics don't make it any easier. Ships weapons blend in with the purposefully line-filled backgrounds - and solid walls appear on certain levels that appear to just be part of the background, leading to plenty of unfair deaths.
Thankfully, at least when you get a game over (which will be often) you're able to pick up directly from where you left off, with a full complement of lives, and often with a new "Evolution" in tow. As you play through the game, you'll gradually unlock "Evolutions" for the game - whether it's unlocking a new weapon for your craft, a new set of levels, or the ability to increase your number of lives. While this won't make you die any less, it does at least make your deaths a bit more tolerable, as at least you're working towards something new - and with every game over, you're getting closer to something that might help you survive that little bit longer.
To try and pad out the package a bit more, there are a few extra modes bolted on here, although it's all very similar. The challenge mode sets you 99 randomly generated levels to attempt to survive through, but far more interesting is the music mode, which takes a song, either from your hard drive, or your PC, and designs a level around it. While there still doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the aliens it throws at you, it's at least a nice idea - while you survive.
For the right price, Space Invaders: Infinity Gene could be worth a flutter, simply to see how far you can get. It's not the sort of game you can play for hours on end, but if you've got the reactions of a cat (or at least, a cat who's a bit more with it than ours), then you'll probably get some fun out of this. But considering Space Invaders: Infinity Gene is currently retailing on iTunes for £2.99, but costs 800 Microsoft Points, or £6.80 on the Xbox 360, despite being exactly the same game, it doesn't take Carol Vorderman to work out that the 360 offering may not be offering the best value for money at face value. When combined with how frustrating, and often unfair the game can feel, you'd probably be best giving this one a miss.
Unless you're a bit of a masochist, in which case, this is right up your street.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
