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Stupid Invaders

Score: 70%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: Ubisoft Entertainment
Developer: xilam
Media: CD/4
Players: 1
Genre: Miscellaneous

Graphics & Sound:

The one department that Stupid Invaders has absolutely no problems in is with the graphics and sound. The game sports, without a doubt, the best adventure game visuals I've ever seen. Everything is pre-rendered, and there are lots of cutscenes that break up the game that are even prettier than the game itself. (Some might say there are too many cutscenes, but I digress.) Everything has that Toy Story CG rendered look, a plasticy style of graphics that go well with the theme of the game. These graphics come at a price, however -- unless you do the massively huge full install of the game, you're going to have to sit through long load times between every area. I suggest you clear off a few gigs of disc space before you install this game.

The sound is almost as good, which is to say that it is excellent. The voice acting is top notch, conveying the attitude of the various characters in the game surprisingly well. And there are quite a few laugh-out-loud lines, although the humour stays considerably more juvenile than I'd like. The music ranges from nonexistent to appropriate, and will probably neither impress or bother you. The sound effects are fairly minimal, but what's there is quite good, and often quite humourous.


Gameplay:

And while there's some good gameplay to be found in Stupid Invaders, it gets bogged down in stupid technical issues and the return of something I thought we had seen the end of in adventure games -- stupid deaths. This alone almost made me throw the discs out the window, and the mazes (ye gods, what were the developers thinking?) near the end brought me that much closer, but there are a few gems here if you dig hard enough.

In Stupid Invaders, you control a motley crew of five aliens on a quest to get off of Earth and back home. Of course, a certain evil character has it out for you, and from the get-go you're presented with challenges that will bewilder and amuse. There's not much plot in Stupid Invaders, but what's there is quite amusing.

You control each character separately, jumping between the characters as the game sees fit. The basic game consists of the same adventure fare that we've been doing for ages -- click on the environment, and your guy moves there. Click to examine something, or pick it up, or whatever. Combine items, use them on things, and get further in the game.

Unfortunately, Stupid Invaders brings back a convention or two that I thought we had lost in the great Adventure Game Upgrade that was brought about by Lucasarts. First of all, you will die in Stupid Invaders, and die a lot. Things that don't make any sense will kill you, and send you back to the title screen. Saving often is key. While many of the deaths are quite amusing, it doesn't excuse them. There's nothing more frustrating than having to creep-and-save in an adventure game.

And the great pixel-hunt is back with a vengeance. Search for tiny hot-spots to turn on switches, or try to find the one place where the camera shifts angle so you can see what you have to do next. This sort of thing is really unforgivable in this day and age -- it was annoying in Maniac Mansion, and it's still annoying now.

Stupid Invaders limits your inventory, which is a good thing -- you never have to worry about having a gajillion junk things cluttering up your, er, whatever aliens store their stuff in. And the humour in Stupid Invaders, while base, elicited a chuckle or two from me as I played the game. But it's a little too short for my tastes, and the inclusion of a maze is another Thing That Should Not Be Done.


Difficulty:

None of the puzzles in Stupid Invaders are particularly challenging, although you'd have to be a veteran to the genre to figure out a few of them. There's a non-trivial amount of 'try anything'ing in the game, and the fact that you may die by doing the wrong thing doesn't particularly encourage experimentation. In case you don't read the instruction book before you play, take note: F1 and F2 are load and save, respectively. Use them wisely.

Maze . . . ugh.


Game Mechanics:

The basic controls are terribly simple, and reminiscent of the first mouse-driven Sierra games. You right click to toggle between multiple actions if they're available, left click to do the action, and hit the space bar to pull up your inventory, where you can combine things and pick what to use. The space bar is frustratingly unresponsive, but it's not completely annoying. The pixel-hunting mechanics are, however, so make sure you search every darkened corner in the game for something to click on. Ugh.

Note that the game loads slow as hell if you don't do a full install, which is something only those of us with massive hard drives can really afford -- four discs worth of game means quite a bit of space on the hard drive. It's worth the install, however.

Stupid Invaders doesn't do much of anything new with the genre, and it certainly has quite a few flaws (did I mention dying? And the maze?), but in this day and age where decent adventure games are few and far between, there may be a market for this sort of game. If you've worn out everything else recently -- the Monkey Island series and The Longest Journey, pretty much -- and you're a die-hard and starving fan of the genre, you may want to take a look at Stupid Invaders. Everyone else should probably spend their money somewhere else.


-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications
AKA Phil Bordelon

Minimum System Requirements:



P2 266, Win9x, 16MB RAM, 6x CD-ROM, Sound Card, Video Card, 250MB HD Space, keyboard, mouse
 

Test System:



Athlon 1.1GHz running Win98 SE, 512MB RAM, GeForce 2 GTS w/ 32MB RAM, SoundBlaster Live!, 8x DVD-ROM

Windows Steel Soldiers Windows Star Trek Away Team

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated