Developed/Published by: Taito / Square Enix
Released: June 17th, 2008
Completed: 21st September 2015
Completion: Finished it on the easiest path, saw the final level of all the other paths.
Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Should I count this one? I’m not completely sure. I saw the credits, but the final levels of all but the easiest path (the game uses an Outrun-esque branching path… well, not that Outrun-esque, it’s performance-based) the final level is so annoyingly hard I just couldn’t be bothered. I saw them. I felt like that was enough.

Anyway. Space Invaders Extreme! A tribute for Space Invaders’ 30th Anniversary, it took the “modernisation” approach of things like Pac-Man C.E. (which, now that I think about it, was probably one of the only things like that about at the time) where the game is, you know, similar, but given a modern look that’s supposed to feel retro without actually being retro, and made faster and more intense in the meantime.

And for the most part, this works! There’s a fairly clean basic system at hand here. The game has your invaders slowly creeping their way down the screen the way they do, and you want to kill four of the same colour to get them to drop a power-up for your weapon, and basically keep doing that to keep yourself killing efficiently. There are some kinks, of course, with special flashing UFOs and so on that let you enter special little challenges and unlock “fever time” for even more points, and if you get down to it the scoring system is really, really complex, but overall it’s got that nice aspect where there are only a few things you really need to do to understand enough to challenge yourself on a higher level than “just survive” (and those things help you survive, anyway) that it’s pretty good!

I’m not completely convinced by it, though. It’s obvious that the designers felt that the main game wasn’t quite enough, and the mini-challenges that take you out of the main game (dumping you back in fever time) are jarring and pretty dumb (they feel unnecessary and flow-damaging) and the range of invader types isn’t quite as clever as you’d hope. Some invaders are pretty much impervious to the otherwise best weapon (the laser) with the other power-up weapons not having the same kind of handicap, which just feels like an irritating nerf rather than good design, and as the game gets harder, some invaders just bomb right down at top speed as soon as they’re hit once and kill you. You can prepare and work around this, but in some cases you’ll find yourself on the other side of some enemy fire as they’re bombing down, and you’re like “well, I guess I’m losing a life here.” Instant kill bullets hitting you is fine, instant kill enemies that don’t even need to hit you? Pretty bad.

It’s those, actually, that made the last levels so unpleasant and so give-uppy, because they’re outright unfair, and the game got down to that thing that I’m just not a fan of in shooters—memorisation. Unless you were willing to know to have this weapon here, that weapon there, to be in this place, which I wasn’t, I don’t think you can get through them.

So, yeah. Great game until they over-egg the design in the name of creating a stronger challenge. Not a bad game, just an unnecessarily flawed one.

Will I ever play it again? I have Space Invaders Extreme 2 on DS! I’m gonna play that one, maybe it’s an improvement?

Final Thought: This reminds me that I spent 500 Wii Points on Space Invaders Get Even even though I knew it was basically only a demo because I wanted to try it. It seemed pretty cool? But I really have no idea because there wasn’t anywhere near enough in the $5 demo to understand if I wanted to drop $15 on the rest. Alas.