Take charge of five soldiers and slaughter thousands upon thousands of aliens. Infested Planet mixes RTS, action and a sprinkle of tower defense to give the player a ton of options for killing whilst providing satisfying and skill-based gameplay.
Its TD aspect shines through as an efficient method of crowd control, defense, and at times even allows for players to be that much more aggressive. The goal for each level is to go from alien base to alien base, disabling and capturing them, so that you may move on to the next, while defending all previous bases. Towers greatly help with this effort, especially in later levels where things become frantic.
In general, there is a ton of strategy involved in the game. You must manage your resources appropriately so that you have the units, structures, and upgrades you need to beat every level. After the first couple of levels you are also forced to spread out your units and decide which alien bases to attack first. Units also have effective counters, weaknesses and strengths. Altogether this leads to interesting strategic gameplay for each level.
Because Infested Planet is an indie game, some part of it had to suffer due to budget. I would definitely say that the graphics did in this case. While the graphics do serve their purpose they are far from nice. I don’t think that the standard argument of “stylized graphics” can be applied here either since the textures themselves aren’t even good quality. But the graphics don’t get in the way of the highly enjoyable gameplay, so they can and should be forgiven.
Story was another blip in this game’s perfection. However, I really don’t think the developers ever meant for it to be anything more than a reason/setting for players to kill a bunch of aliens. The story basically just serves as a way for the game to explain why all the gameplay is developing the way it is (new enemy types coming in, objectives, and new units to make use of).
Overall, Infested planet has surprisingly fun gameplay filled with varying enemy types, plenty of options for killing said enemies, an okay filler story and graphics that serve their purpose. I had a lot of fun with this game and I think you can too if you can get over its mediocre graphics and story. Rocket Bear Games have made the game available for PC and Mac now at the fair price of $14.99.
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