Intelligent design?
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| Source // Square Enix |
The last time I played Space Invaders was extreme, by which I mean I played Space Invaders Extreme for the Nintendo DS, which turned a space shooter (remember when every other game on this 1001 list was a space shooter?) into a sort of musical instrument.
It also came with every other colour that simply wasn't possible when all you had available was white, so Extreme looked pretty cool as well.
Now, I'm well aware the screenshot above is a little lacking in the colour department, but that's not the case with every single part of Space Invaders Infinity Gene, an iOS reboot, I guess, that's heavy on evolving Space Invaders into the next big thing.
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| Source // Square Enix |
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| Source // Square Enix |
Fun Times
Knowing my iOS woes, I headed straight for the Xbox 360 to download a demo of Infinity Gene, which gives us the briefest of glimpses of the hundreds of levels and stages in this next step of evolution for the game.
I keep mentioning evolution because Infinity Gene keeps mentioning evolution, even going as far as quoting Charles Darwin himself.
The reason? Infinity Gene is Space Invaders at heart, insofar as you pilot a ship and shoot aliens, but seemingly each and every level you pass or boss you defeat changes up the gameplay in some way.
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| Source // Square Enix |
You play a few seconds of the original Space Invaders before Infinity Gene abandons it for something much more involved. In mere moments, the enemies are unrecognizable and the arena hints at the game taking place in three dimensions, though you are still locked into two.
If you look at your ship in the middle of the screen, you'll notice it isn't locked to the bottom, where it usually is. Already, Infinity Gene has evolved to give us the ability to move up and down as well, and suddenly Space Invaders is now a bullet hell.
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| Source // Square Enix |
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| Source // Square Enix |
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| Source // Square Enix |
Frustrations
I'm not a big fan of bullet hell shooters. It's mostly because I can't move quick enough to avoid the hundred incoming threats I have to deal with, but in Infinity Gene, it's also because the gameplay keeps switching on you.
We're now in a level that is even more three-dimensional, where we can move into and out from the screen, but now we've lost the ability to move up and down, or at least I think we have, but by the time I could test it out the view had rotated somewhere else, so it was back to being more of a top-down shooter, and I'd lost a ship by crashing into something I wasn't supposed to crash into.
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| Source // Square Enix |
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| Source // Square Enix |
Why did I crash and burn so often? Lack of weapons? Not in the full game, as it has a whole bunch of different shot types that you can equip on your ship, familiar to anyone who has ever played a shoot 'em up. In the demo, you're stuck with the basic weapon but you've got buttons that allow it to be fired near infinitely, and an evolution that increases the rate of fire if you're sitting still.
But when paired with mesmerizing visuals that change so often and so quickly that you're never quite sure what you're looking at until it kills you, and with an accelerated progression through the levels to give you more of a taste of the things you'll encounter in the full game, Infinity Gene just ended up bombarding me to the point where I couldn't keep up.
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| Source // Square Enix |
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| Source // Square Enix |
And yet more often than not, it looked great. Cool, even. Hard to read for inexperienced shoot 'em up players like me, but easy enough to dive into that practice will make perfect, and when perfection comes, you can finally dip into the mode where everything evolves that much more quickly and erratically.
Final Word
I can't imagine how it played on iOS devices if playing it with an actual controller was difficult for me, or whether you even saw much of what was going on while your fingers were sliding in front of it all. The sights you do see are nice, in places, though. This is definitely an evolution of Space Invaders, but has evolution go too far?
On the one hand, I enjoyed it. Infinity Gene sure has brought Space Invaders kicking and screaming into the modern age, introducing ideas that other games in the genre have had decades of their own to tweak and perfect.
On the other hand, good Lord was it difficult. I suspect a fair bit of trial and error is needed to know what to do in some of the situations that are put in front of you, and if you need to do that while in the middle of going for a new high score, there are sure to be some annoyed folks out there.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe the enemies and their shots stick out like a sore thumb and I'm the only one that can't see it. Maybe I need to brush up on the language of the bullet-hell shooter. Maybe I just need to play the full game of Space Invaders Infinity Gene at its intended pace.
I'm in no rush to try, but it was nice to see, and some of the visuals are rather surprising if you've no idea where this game will take Space Invaders. Definitely worth a look at least.
Fun Facts
Apparently, the developers wanted to avoid bullet-hell and make Infinity Gene welcoming to newcomers. The game looks more like hell than it actually is. So how do I tell fake hell from real hell apart?
Space Invaders Infinity Gene, developed by Taito, first released in 2009.
Version played: Demo, Xbox 360, 2010.