Hands On Snailien Invasion

The guys from Manly Games were so nice to allow me to write about my first impressions of Snailien Invasion. I played it for about an hour, first alone and then in local co-op and deathmatch.

Snailien Invasion is a pure multiplayer game – you can play solo, but this is definitely not what the game was made for. I admit I was bit disappointed, because after the trailer I did expect a neat platformer with coop modes. Instead I got more or less Unreal Tournament with Snailiens.

But frustration pretty fast turned into amazement. With Snailien Invasion there is another hot top notch title soon available on the marketplace. Polished to the amount that it could have been an XBLA title and would still look good! Here my first impressions of the game.

I started alone with a mode called “Drone Survival” … you choose one of the many levels and fight waves of drones. I selected “Towers”, a vertical level that lets you reach for the skies.

In the game you take control of an alien snail – a Snailien. With the right trigger you shoot your weapon and with the left you can use a grappling hook to play Spiderman. This works incredibly well and you need little to no time to get used to it.

Thankfully space snails are a lot faster than the earth equivalent, they even can jump (i´m kind of grateful earth snails don´t). Little jet packs on their backs can lift them up if there is nothing to hook the grapple to. For snails they are pretty mobile and fast.

To fight the appearing drones you have 4 weapons…

the Macrogun … some kind of machinegun
the Shredder … it shoots shreds that explode on impact, stick where they hit as proximity mines or just explode after a while
the Plasma Blaster … short range, but ignores any kind of obstacles
the Matter Bomb … it creates round balls of matter – perfect to trap enemies in or to provide a nice platform to shot from

These are only the 4 weapons you start with … there are 24 weapons in the game from what I have seen so far. You just need to unlock them by gathering research points.

The single player mode is mildly entertaining since the controls work very well and you can unlock a lot of stuff. I was motivated to look at other maps – some of them are more ground or underground based and let you use welding equipment to burn yourself through the ground and lots of other stuff.

The graphics are quite nice to look at and even though there is no background music, the sound effects are great and I did not even notice the lack of music before I watched my gameplay video.

After a while it became boring though – so I got my brother to join in and we started a coop session of “Drone Survival”. It was pretty fun and I liked it a lot. I guess if you play with 4 players it would get really good.

After that we decided to play versus – “Team Deathmatch” or “Capture The Flag” seemed like a bad idea with just two players, so we picked Deathmatch. We played 3 rounds – he had a lot of fun, I almost won one game (and still had a lot of fun).

The splitscreen works well and even with two players you don´t have to look too long for something to hunt – little arrows show you the way. I can´t wait though for the game to arrive on the marketplace and play online matches with even more players. This is obviously what the game was made for – and I am sure it will rock.

So my impression? A must buy title – you really should take a look at the trial once the game hits the marketplace! It will cost 3$ (240MSPs) and this is one hell of a deal.

Tell your friends to get it too and you are ready to go for some wild multiplayer matches.

Bookmark It