Review
Space Invaders Infinity Gene
by RevStu (April 7th, 2010 at 1:56 pm)
While it has a lot going for it, Infinity Gene just isn’t a five-star game. It’s one of those games with a weird metastructure where your first play-through doesn’t feel like a “proper” one – because you’re just trying to get it out of the way in order to access some basic features which are inexplicably locked at the start – but then once you’ve got to the end (which will take you maybe one day of play), it’s hard to see where the replay value is.
You can’t score-attack normal stages individually, for example, only the Extra ones. And the high-scores seem to take no account of difficulty settings or number of lives, making even those fairly pointless. Score-attacking the entire 18-stage normal game from the beginning is also a bit dull because it takes so long to get difficult, especially because you keep evolving more powerful new weapons. (And obviously still suffers from the settings problem.)
You’re not really playing to unlock all the Extra stages either, because you don’t have to beat one level to unlock the next – you can unlock them just by playing one stage over and over again. Basically there are no goals or challenges. It’s just an interactive design demo showcasing all the clever ideas the team had for different types of rounds, and while there are certainly a lot of those ideas, there isn’t actually a coherent game built around them.
The much-vaunted custom music stages are rather shoddily implemented – when I tried one, I got a boss battle at the end of the song and assumed it was over when I destroyed the boss and the screen went blank, only for the song to start up again from the beginning and several more waves to appear, before it finished for real about 60 seconds into the second rendition. And there are no high scores for custom stages either.
There’s also some sort of lag/inertia in your movement which results in the position of your ship changing relative to your finger, which is very irritating. (You start off with the ship an inch above your finger, say, then go up and down the screen a couple of times and suddenly your finger’s right on top of the ship so you can’t see what you’re doing.) The game could really do with a small dead zone/score bar/whatever at the bottom of the screen, so that you can get the ship all the way to the bottom without having to lift off and change your finger position.
It’s certainly very stylish and inventive, but to me it’s like a 2D version of Rez – I want to love it for its style but can’t quite manage to because the gameplay isn’t quite there. With the high-score flaws and no online leaderboards I can’t be bothered to play a level five times for the sole purpose of unlocking a single monochrome graphic in the gallery. But if you’re one of those people who love Rez because you’re dazzled by the pretty lights and don’t care that there isn’t actually much of a game structure in there, you’ll go crazy for Infinity Gene.
Re the steering: it’s actually quite nice – you can put your finger wherever you want and move it, and the ship will make the same movement (instead of going to where your finger is). This is very handy e.g. for OH GOD THEY ARE COMING FROM BELOW where you have your ship mid-screen, the finger at the top and have clear view of both your ship surroundings and the bottom of the screen.