S&S Mobile Review: Infestor

Title: Infestor

Format: iOS

Release Date: January 17^th, 2013

Publisher: Ravenous Games

Developer: Ravenous Games

Price: $0.99

ESRB Rating: 4+

     Get ready for a fun puzzle platformer created by the award-winning studio Ravenous Games!

STORY

     In Infestor, you play as a cute pixilated, yet highly contagious and deadly virus, tasked with escaping a multitude of space colonies. The only way you have a chance of escaping is if you infect and control each type of humans, all with different abilities, in order to overcome challenging obstacles and escape the colony. While the story may seem pretty bland and may have been previously used, Infestor’s game play really carries the overall experience, and does a pretty good job.

CONTROLS

     Infestor’s controls are very simplistic, yet work extremely well and responsively. It is essentially the same control scheme as all of Ravenous’ platformers, especially the League of Evil games along with Random Heroes. To move your infection you use two horizontally oriented arrows located in the bottom left of the screen. Three virtual buttons in the bottom right of the screen control jumping, “infecting,” and shooting. The only thing that I think should be added to the controls is the option for all of the virtual buttons to be moveable, as I often found myself hitting the button because they were too close.

CORE GAMEPLAY AND PRESENTATION

     Ravenous has once again crafted great looking platformer with a 16-art style that’s become very usual for the company. In every level you’re tasked with finding and escaping through a pipe across the map that unlocks the next level. Each level also comes with it’s own set of obstacles that can only be passed if you utilize the different types of humans and their corresponding abilities. For example, builders can push large blocks, athletes can jump incredibly high, and overseers can unlock gates. This adds an extra layer of challenge, but it becomes increasingly repetitive, a pattern found throughout this entire game. There is only one “world” consisting of 60 individual levels that continuously use the same background art and level design, even the soundtrack is a repeated version of the same chiptune.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Infestor is a cool looking and mildy challenging platformer, but I truly expected more from Ravenous Games after they proved they knew how to make great platformers like the League of Evil games. Infestor performed pretty well, with only a small glitch every so often but became incredibly tedious and boring after a couple of minutes. After the 20 level mark I felt as though I was playing the same level repeatedly. Overall Infestor is a pretty good platformer that doesn’t particularly stand out in Ravenous’ stunning array of amazing platformers.

                                                                                                                           S&S Rating: 7.5/10

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              @DrMrPHD