Space Invaders Extreme 2 Review Page 2

28 Oct 2009 at 15:02:37 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (DS)

You get the idea: just about everything in the game can be comboed in some way, which pretty much means that random blasting will net you a few, but that there's also some sort of pattern to every single individual wave that will net you maximum points. It's an excellent way to update a classic while still staying true to the core gameplay of shooting slowly-advancing aliens, and it serves as a happy reminder of other games with similar combo systems, in which a single mistake can ruin your combo for the next thirty seconds – a lifetime, in a game like this. The criminally unknown Audiosurf is what springs to mind most quickly, weirdly, but the general flow of gameplay bears resemblance to Geometry Wars and The Club, and the sense of flow combined with branching levels compares favourably to Outrun.

And happily, the presentation ties it all together. The sprites themselves haven't been updated in 3D or anything like that – they retain their simplistic, single-colour look, with only a few graphical tweaks to differentiate between the different types. The backgrounds, though, are whirling, flashing images, ingrained with a few of the different types of combos you can amass – which, too, fit nicely into the background without ever being obtrusive.

While all of that keeps the flow going, it's the sound that finally ties everything together into a neat package. Let's drop a few more names and say that it's reminiscent of maybe Space Giraffe, or Rez. The backing music becomes more frantic when a Fever starts, your shot sounds are musical based on the stage, and it's this which combines gameplay, graphics, and sound into a glorious whole.

It's telling that I've name-dropped a lot of things in this review, from Geometry Wars to Rez, because they're very, very similar: retro-inspired games with simplistic graphics that nonetheless manage to combine pretty much every aspect of the gameplay and the presentation in a way that so few games really manage. Space Invaders Extreme 2 isn't perfect, I admit: you're not going to sit there playing it for hours on end, and once you've cleared each of the various paths not much will surprise you. Hell, even the levels on those paths are hard to differentiate because – although they get more difficult – not a great deal noticably changes. You won't have favourite alien patterns. If you have the first Space Invaders Extreme game, there probably won't be enough new here to tempt you into a purchase.

But there's the combo system, the short levels, the ability to continue from where you died, the inimitable one-more-go factor, and – it must be said – the budget price. All of these combine to make something that, while not a must-have, is a skilfully-crafted diversion that you'll keep coming back to for quite some time.

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