Infected
Score: 71% ESRB: Mature Publisher: Majesco Developer: Planet Moon Media: UMD/1 Players: 1 - 8 (Ad Hoc or Infrastructure) Genre: Action
Graphics & Sound: Infected takes place in New York City, and as such, each level is comprised of usually nothing more than a few wreckage-strewn city blocks. You won’t get much of a chance to stop and enjoy the scenery though; there is always plenty of crazy stuff happening onscreen to keep your attention diverted. Perhaps even too much stuff; the effects, while colorful, can get busy at times and obscure your vision or at least distort it in a way that negatively affects the gameplay. The sound, at least to me, is a very sharp double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have solid effects and well spoken (and written, for that matter) dialogue. On the other, you’ve got a totally licensed musical score that is comprised of the dregs of hard rock. While you have the options to customize the play order of these songs and even turn them off altogether, there is very little original content here. You’re stuck with a lot of crap or nothing at all.
Gameplay: Infected is a game about zombies, and while this premise has been done to death and back again, the developers have strived to put interesting and comedic content first. While this does a good job at initially entertaining you, it doesn’t help the fact that the rest of the game is far from funny when it comes to playability. Planet Moon Studios is the same group of people who brought us the games Armed & Dangerous and Giants: Citizen Kabuto. While Giants was nominated many times for game of the year when it came out, what these games were noted for was their UK-induced humor and how well they pulled it off. There is no shortage of the tongue-in-cheek content in Infected, but where the story and comedy leave off, the gameplay forgets to pick up. As zombies break loose during the lighting of the Christmas tree in NYC, you get attacked and wake up in a hospital with a severe bite that should have been fatal. This is special because not only are you immune to the zombie disease, your blood is like kryptonite to the undead horde. This becomes your main weapon in the fight against the undead, as you wield a gun that is rigged up to your veins and shoots bullets infused with your blood. At this point, the game becomes run-and-gun. There are various types of levels including hostage rescue, defense, and kill ‘em all, but it ends up being the same routine over and over again. The faster you kill the zombies and finish the level, the more points and money you get to upgrade your weapons. You also need to finish enough levels in a fast enough amount of time in order to move onto the next. While this is a good incentive to do well in each mission, it can become annoying in the long run to have to repeat levels with the sole purpose of completing them in a shorter amount of time. Multiplayer, for the most part, is pretty standard. There are the regular deathmatch, attack a single player, and civilian saving modes. The strange bit comes in when you win a Multiplayer game. Upon victory, you "infect" all of the players you defeated. Your character then appears as the bad guy in their high level Single Player missions, and they have to play as your character in Multiplayer missions until they defeat the high level Single Player missions. A nifty little feature despite the fact that it doesn’t affect gameplay at all.
Difficulty: Infected has a fair amount of difficulty inherent in it. The initial learning curve is fairly steep on the normal setting, but this can easily be altered to a lower setting. Once the game gets going though, the difficulty rises steadily, but it is usually due to the insane numbers of zombies that are thrown at you, reducing the challenge to a steady stream of button-mashing. Not the easiest game out there, but the challenge could have been a little bit more worth the effort.
Game Mechanics: Infected is played in an over-the-shoulder view mode. It’s not a terribly bad view, and it adds to the feeling of chaos as you run around shooting things. However, being able to change the view would have helped out a lot and made the game more easily accessible to more players. A trend that I am seeing happen far too often in PSP games is the attempted use of the single analog stick to maneuver your character around a three dimensional world. The implementation is always forced, and the lack of any strafing capabilities hinders your control in a very bad way. What does work well in the game is the lock-on system. A simple press-and-hold of a button locks you onto a zombie, and the press of another switches between other available targets. When you have one locked, you must shoot it with your weapon in your right hand (pistol, shotgun, bazooka, etc.) in order to weaken it. Once it has become weakened, it glows red at which point you shoot it with the gun that is hooked up to your blood stream. The carnage that ensues steps far over the line of "regular" blood and guts, and what’s better is that you can link these exploding zombies by killing them in large groups to create some truly spectacular gore. The comedy and satire are presented very well in Infected. However, had the game been slightly better executed they would have been worth the price of admission. These qualities can only take the game so far, and the experience quickly runs out of steam. This just goes to show you that no amount of style can save a flawed game.
-Snow Chainz, GameVortex Communications AKA Andrew Horwitz
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