Game: Aliens: Infestation

Platform: DS

Publisher: Sega

Developer: WayForward

ESRB: T

Genre: Side scrolling bug hunt

Players: 1

What's Hot: Successfully recreates the dread filled atmosphere of “Aliens”, death has meaning, great characterization

What's Not: Non-xenomorph enemies seem out of place, autosaves can be painful, difficult at times

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Review by: Brandon "Pulse Rifle" Cackowski-Schnell

When was the last time you thought about lives in a video game? Be honest. I’m not talking about looking at the counter on the screen to gauge how easy or difficult the next run between checkpoints is going to be. I’m talking about giving some thought to where these multiple attempts at completion come from. Lives in games are remnants of a coin-op era gone by, and some would argue that they have no place in modern video gaming other than artificially extending the difficulty, and by extension the play time of games. Enter Aliens: Infestation, the latest side scroller from WayForward. It isn’t perfect and there are some odd design choices, but after this game, you’ll never look at video game lives the same way again.

Despite being the second film in the series, Aliens did all of the heavy lifting in establishing the tenaciousness and utter lethality of the xenomorphs. Just another bug hunt, our wise-cracking group of marines thought before being dropped into Hadley’s Hope and systematically picked apart regardless of having what they considered to be superior weaponry and tactics. Aliens: Infestation picks up right where Aliens left off with yet another group of marines entering into a conflict for which they are woefully unprepared.

Just like in Aliens, you control a squad of marines and just like in other games, you have extra lives, but WayForward has combined the two concepts to where your extra lives are the marines in your squad. In other words, if you lose a life in this game, and trust me you will lose lives, you don’t lose a number on a counter; you lose an actual marine. It may be the gruff heavy weapon toting female marine, it may be the scared to the point of soiling himself new recruit, it may be that weird guy you found having a barbecue among the xenomorph corpses, but when they’re gone—they’re gone. Dead, kaput, never to return. If these were nameless, generic marines, the system would lose some of its impact, but every marine is beautifully animated and each has their own personality making the loss of a life feel like the loss of a friend as well as a hit to your chances of survival.

If and when you lose a squad member, your only recourse is to search Hadley’s Hope and the Sulaco for additional marines. Flares are at your disposal to mark map points once you find new recruits; a welcome addition as your new found friends will remain in their current hiding place if you have a full squad. This is the only time I felt that the extra lives system was a bit too strict as it didn’t make sense thematically for someone to stay on an alien infested ship simply because they were ordered to stay put. After all, you’re all marines, and if there’s someone ordering you around it stands to reason that your CO can order someone else around too.

The intent is clear though—the designers want you to balance the need for extra squad members with the possibility of losing more lives on the way to obtaining new recruits. I get it, but at the same time it feels false. Also, given that the game will auto save after boss battles, potentially with your squad reduced to a team of one, it would be nice if found team members could automatically show up.

Even when your squad is completely filled out, survival is not a guarantee. This is an Aliens game and the xenomorphs, chest bursters and facehuggers can reduce your health to almost nothing with but a few swipes of tail and claw. For some odd reason, WayForward felt it necessary to add human and robot (robot, not artificial person) enemies into the mix, and while these enemies aren’t as interesting as the acid blooded enemies of the films, they’ll kill you just as dead. I would have been happy with nothing but aliens, especially as the robot and human attacks seem somewhat cheap, but the end result works in that every trip down a hallway is filled to the brim with potential death. Worse, monsters will respawn making trips from your current location to a mapped out health pack, save room, or squad member a potential life or death choice.

The game has a Metroidvania feel to it in that upon making it to a new area you’ll be without the necessary equipment to proceed, be it a welding torch or flashlight or some other navigational maguffin. Once you obtain said item you can then backtrack and open up new and interesting avenues of potential slaughter; however the game still places some limits on how much you can backtrack. Luckily you retain your toys, so as you jump between Hadley’s Hope and the Sulaco, you won’t have to go looking for a welding torch again. You just have to wait until the game lets you bounce between the environments.

This being an Aliens game, the sound is a very important component. Ambient noises such as dripping pipes and the creaking and groaning of the ship ratchet up the tension and the staccato burst of a pulse rifle and the frantic yet measured beeping of the motion detector are all recreated perfectly. Play the game in the dark, with a good pair of headphones on and you’ll be amazed at how immersive and stressful the whole experience is.

For all the game does well, there are a few low points. Boss battles are the usual patterned affair and once you’ve been down a certain corridor, experience plus your motion tracker lets you know what’s coming and from where it will spring. The auto-save after boss battles, combined with whisking you away to a new environment is unfortunate as it probably means you’ll have fewer squad mates than you’d like (with restarting the game your only recourse). Still, even with these marks against it, Aliens: Infestation is worth playing and is an example of a game that really, truly cares about your lives—even if it cares about your deaths just a teensy bit more.

Brandon Cackowski-Schnell is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast and co-founder of No High Scores.

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