Aliens Infestation Review

As I mentioned before, there are several enemies other than just the Aliens to face. You fight against UPP soldiers as well as UPP combat droids (which look like your typical robots so WayForward didn’t rock the boat in that design) and at some point, you fight Weyland-Yutani…somethings. I think they were supposed to be synthetics from the white blood but they didn’t do much. I was punched by one once but other than that they weren’t a problem.

All your typical Aliens are there from the egg to the Queen but the Phobos mission also introduced a different variant in the way of Gorilla Aliens which were a lot faster than the others. Their introduction had me on my toes.

You also face five bosses throughout the course of the game. You fight three different Queens on the Sulaco, a Jockey-Alien on LV-426 and another hybrid on Phobos which was either a larger Gorilla hybrid or I’ve seen it referred to as the Rhino Alien.  For the most part, these bosses demand you sacrifice at least one marine to them as they require a fair amount of punishment which involves you constantly attacking a specific part of their bodies.

However, two of the bosses do require something a little more interesting. The second boss fight aboard the Sulaco involves you having to injure the Queen and then activate several terminals in the airlock to jettison the Queen into space. It was another fan service moment but it worked. Once I figured out what it was going to be, I had another one of those smiles on my face as I set about channelling Ripley.

Infestation features all your typical Colonial Marine equipment in the way of the M41A, the VP70, shotgun, flamethrower and smartgun. These weapons can be upgraded (improved damage and range) by finding upgrade boxes scattered throughout the game but you can only upgrade each weapon 3 times. I am starting to become disappointed at the lack of new weapons, however, as recently it looks like all Aliens related games aren’t expanding with new designs.

As I mentioned before, you also find a motion tracker, a map, several variants of explosives (demolition charges, typical grenades and pulse rifle grenades) and the cool flare feature. Oh, and the torches and welder. Initially, much of the Sulaco is blocked off by locked doors or dark areas that prevent you from progressing. Once you recover these items you can move further into the ship. It was a very nice way of structuring the Sulaco for progression later on.

One of the features that WayForward was really pushing was the squad feature which essentially acted as your lives. Throughout the game, there are 19 playable marine characters for you to find and recruit into your squad. Your squad consists of a “point man”, which is the marine you play with plus three additional reinforcements.

If you have a full squad you can’t recruit these marines so it’s best to mark their position with a flare and return to them if you lose a squad member. All the marines have their own personalities which is shown through the story slides in the game and their little quirky animations when you enter the communication room, which is basically your save room.

This is the main replay draw of the game, the ability to have the story told 19 different ways – as long as you keep your point man alive. If not, then you shift to another marine and a different personality. The thinking behind this is also attachment to the characters you’re playing. I can’t say this particularly worked for me during my first play through as like I said, the bosses seemed to demand I sacrifice at least one marine to them so I was often swapping to a new character.

However, I do intend to replay and try and keep my point man alive so I can experience this feature as intended by WayForward. This brings us to another feature of Infestation that was heavily talked about, captured marines. If your marine is killed during the main sections of the levels then they will actually be captured by the Aliens and taken to their hive.

At that point, you have three minutes to get to them and save them. This is a cool feature but the problem is they’re usually taken to the other side of the map that has you fighting your way back through the map.

The game respawns all the enemies you have killed when you move through a new section, resulting in a reloading of the section so you will find yourself continually fighting through the same locations and same enemy placements when you’re backtracking or rescuing your captured marines.

I must be honest in that this inconvenience had me just abandoning people as I wanted to progress through the game and not have to go back on myself. Bad gaming on my part? Yeah, quite probably but I tend to find people find it frustrating having to backtrack on themselves too often.

If you get there in time, the marine returns to your squad. If you’re slightly late he returns to your squad but will eventually give birth a few minutes later on. And if you’re completely off the mark then it’s “game over, man. Game over!”

When killed during boss fights or by humans, that marine is simply lost to the great beyond.

I think my biggest gripe with the game has to be just how short it is. It took me around a day and a half to complete the game. And that was with me having an afternoon away from the DS. From the sounds of it, this is the typical length of a shooter/action game for the DS so I can’t help but feel sorry for those DS gamers that prefer the genre but that sounds like a problem with the platform and the genre on the whole.

I honestly enjoyed Infestation a great deal but I feel that it would have benefited from several additional locations. Or even having another larger location like the Sulaco. But as I mentioned above, I do intend to go back and try and experience the game through the various personalities so that the replay incentive is there.

Whether this is a good enough incentive for everyone, I can’t say. And this complaint is a result of really enjoying the experience of playing Aliens – Infestation. I could have happily gone on for several more levels.

Over all I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Infestation. Everything looked and felt right and it was fantastic seeing the Union of Progressive People. The majority of my complaints are small but the extremely disappointingly short playtime really brings it down for me which pulls the score down a little bit.

All the small things are there, it feels like a part of the Aliens universe, the love is there from WayForward and the sprites are wonderfully detailed. Amazon and Play have a fantastic price that I can’t help but recommend you pick it up for. From Corporal Hicks, I award Aliens – Infestation with an 8 out of 10.