joe randel's art dump

I finished Aliens: Infestation for the DS the other day and I thought I’d share my experience with the game.  I’ll start things off with saying that my opinion on the game tips one way and then the other.  How so?  Let me explain.

First off, I love Aliens.  I remember watching Aliens with my older cousin when I was little and it scared the hell out of me.  But I seemed develop a fascination with the series because now I love it (Aliens3 is my fav) .  Second, as we’ve seen a few posts ago, I love pixel work and pixel animations.  Heck, my career is based of it!  So I naturally gravitate towards it.  WayForward always does a top notch job in the pixel department.  The aliens where expertly animated as to be expected.  Third, I’m a sucker for retro or old school style games.  This one takes you back to those SNES days with I think is great.

While there where lots of fun aspects to the game, there where some down notes too, but not many.  While the character animations looked sharp, the backgrounds seemed to fall short and repetitive to me.  The colour pallet seemed to be pretty much the same though out the game.  I also would have liked some more variety in the areas of the ship and the other game locations.

There are weapons and upgrades to collect in the game, but I found that I didn’t really switch my weapon a lot.  Plus you had to wander back to a save room to make the switch.  I understand that realistically you won’t carry 4 different weapons on you, but it did suck when you needed the flame thrower to get through a door and had to go all the way back.  These are minor details though in my opinion and didn’t take me away from the game.  They where just things that I noticed as a traveled around the world.

The coolest aspect of the game is the way they handled the lives.  You start with four marines and a long the way you’ll find others (try and find them all!).  But they won’t join you unless you have a spot open.  So it’s sucks when you start to loose the team, but you’ll be relieved when you find others.  Although, I found it almost impossible to keep your original team.  During the boss fights, I lost usually two people.  In the end I managed to keep one member from the original team, which I though was pretty cool.  In my head, he would relay the stories to the new members of what happened to the previous marines.  Oh the things he would have seen. o_O

Please don’t think that I’m down on this game.  It’s easy to pick on the butt things of a game, as a gamer and a developer I find that I look things more critically then I should.  I really did like this game.  I loved running around killing Aliens and following the story line.  I knew that there where things that I would like to see changed or fixed, but I didn’t let that ruin my time with the game.  I say that if you like retro style games with chunky pixels and Aliens, then pick this up.  If not… heck, pick it up anyway.  It’s fun, and isn’t that what games are all about?