To me, Infested Planet demonstrates the power of two things: that a fantastic game-play trailer can hook you into purchasing a game, and that a great thematic atmosphere can make a good game great.
Infested Planet immediately sets you up as the underdog, and that's truly the great appeal of this game. It captures that feeling so well that you want to keep playing, want to keep going up against a campaign that willfully makes each level a dilemma where you're grinding through thousands of foes just to stay alive. Soon, the sound of mini-guns warming up to stem back the tide of bugs will be the most beautiful music to your ears. Welcome to the front lines, soldier: try not to die.
Infested Planet is a game I purchased because I thought it would be a great little distraction... then it turned out to be an all-weekend obsession. I wasn't expecting to be sucked in as much as I was, to be quite honest: a small budget game with top-down graphics, and with a tired 'humans vs. alien hordes' trope that we have seen before, time and time again.
There are times where your squad feels invulnerable, able to take on all comers...
Except, Infested Planet nails it. While bigger budget games like the wonderful Starcraft series plays at the feeling of fighting against an alien horde, it's handicapped by restrictions, having to balance game-play for multiplayer and multiple playable races. It's why in the wonderful CGI movies, you see the humans being outnumbered ten to one, while the game itself hardly holds up to that feel. This game in comparison has no such issue. It was built simply - and effectively - to put you squarely in the shoes of five to ten soldiers at a time up against an infinite amount of respawning bugs, determined to wipe you off the face of the map.
It's an effective formula, one that's given enough variety to stay fresh, while also being wonderfully straightforward. The typical mission has you dropped into a map with your own hub, surrounded by many bug infestations littered about the map. Several enrage and start spilling their contents immediately towards your base, while others sit and fester, until poor Joe the machine-gunner gets too close, and wakes them up to defend the colony. Starting with assault rifles and some rocket strikes for taking out fortifications, you set out to take apart these hives, one by one, replacing them with your own hubs so they can't be re-infested. That's right: as you fight across the map, you find yourself spreading your points for defenses thinner and thinner, to make sure the foe can't get a foothold again. Choosing your next objective matters, and you often don't have much time to make that choice in.
Then of course, there's the days where things could be going better.
The many available maps keep the game fresh, even on the standard scenario of sweep-and-kill. In addition, what I find the most fun is building up the equipment of my hubs and my crew. Shotguns give out a satisfying crunch of insectoid carapace, but I often love just stacking officers into my crew, which speeds up attack and move speeds so everyone becomes more effective. There are snipers, which are great for taking out priority targets (like miniature spawn points), and flamethrowers to simply watch bugs die by the dozens.
The best - and most frustrating - way the game stays fresh is how the mutation system works. It's what elevates the game from a sweep-and-clear of map after map to something that feels like a true fight for your life. While your unnamed heroes start to find build points across the map and gain steam, the insect horde just keeps getting stronger. As you destroy hives, the entire enemy army begins to mutate, and it often can spell out a dramatic change of tactics for you. Some mutations speed up the foe, making the slower shotguns less effective at clearing clusters, while other mutations make the foe occasionally leave behind spore turrets that pound your defenses from range. One of the most ingenious mutations makes it so as bugs die, they leave behind a shell, a carapace armor that you have to punch through in order to keep desperately killing the other eleven about to eat you.
Join the Army, they said...See the galaxy, they said...
I highly recommend Infested Planet, if just for how effectively it captures a theme and plays it to the hilt. There's plenty here, from the difficult campaign, to side missions with different win objectives, to even a weekly map that offers a new challenge.
Besides, this is the kind of game where high scores feel like badges of honor, where victory is well earned, and where you're often left with a sense of satisfaction as you close your computer at the end of the day.
-Wyatt
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