This is available on Steam Early Access (I am wondering if early access games deserves it’s own thread)?
Anyhow it looks interesting - some people are describing it as Starship Troopers where a few soldiers are holding off whole mobs of alien critters. Part RTS with a hint of Tower Defense.
Whoa, that game! I was sent a playable build exactly two years ago (6/28/11) and I remember thinking it could be pretty cool when it’s done. It has elements of really cool indie strategy games like Eufloria and Atom Zombie Smasher. I’m glad to hear it seems like it will surface soon.
-TomI am probably going to try it since I am on vacation and I think 11.99 is not so bad.
Especially because I was planning on playing Shadowrun Returns the entire week until it got moved back a month!
I am a sucker for the “Troopers” holding back the baddies, “Remember the Alamo” - style.
Even if it is another Early Access game (they are killing me with these early games coming out while I am home all week).
Can you tell it is after 1:00 AM as I write this post?
I was wondering if anyone had played this, and then I find the thread with 3 total posts in it. More people should be giving this a go, its fantastic.
-_-
Undoubtedly one of my highlights of the year. Such a fantastic strategy game, and yes, more people should be playing it. Like Sang-Froid, it’s a game I wouldn’t have known about had Tom not reviewed it, and bizarrely, I played an early version/predecessor of the game many years ago called Attack of the Paper Zombies and thought it was terrific too. http://www.indiebird.com/blog/?page_id=376
And the other, fuller, thread is here: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?74669-This-forum-needs-an-INFESTED-PLANET-thread
Played it, loved it.
Sang-Froid was great too.
Siege Cannon OP!
This was one of those rare games that I played, loved, and was able to understand enough that I didn’t need to find any posts about it online :p
It really is well made. From what I remember everything seems pretty intuitive. Plus things satisfyingly go “splat” when they die.
I think for me Infested Planet’s greatest innovation was its resource pool that could be reallocated at will without losing anything. There’s none of this “Oh damn, I lost that base, better start over” nonsense that permeates most strategy games. Granted, pulling a victory back from those sorts of situations in a traditional RTS is perhaps a greater victory, but in Infested Planet the power shifts back and forth constantly and that just makes each game an even more protracted and exhilarating thrill-ride. You’re constantly experimenting and changing your strategy on the fly to find a way to crack that next hive. There’s no railroading because you committed to a certain strategy early on, and as a result there’s no inevitability either.
Add to this that the levels are regenerated if you restart and the impetus to keep playing that permutation or particular layout knowing you’ll never get another shot at it is a great motivator. Not to mention, a strategy on one level might be useless on another due to the map layout and the evolutions of the bugs being totally different. It’s a really clever and crisp design.
Anyone find a good use for the mine field? I haven’t been able to place it such that it works very well. I wish the mines spread out more.
I use it all the time to take care of an angle of approach that comes around a corner. The bugs all bunch up there.
It’s cheap, so if I was pumping all my points into an assault squad and there was a choke I needed to hold while they did their thing, and I only had a few points left, I’d put one in to temporarily hold off some bugs. Even in a perfect choke sometimes I found a few bugs got through, so it definitely wasn’t a mainstay.
Yeah, at only 3 points mines are a cheap way to hold a place on the map where the bugs bunch, like a corner or narrow tunnel. A minefield and a turret can hold back a large number of bugs, significantly more than a turret by itself will. Two minefields next to each other are good too but some bugs may get through. They are also handy for a cheap and quick deployment outside a recently captured base when expecting a heavy counter-attack. They can be used offensively to good effect when multiple bug bases are close to each other.
As Thesper said, they are not entirely reliable, and so can’t 100% be trusted. Their big advantage is their cheapness, what else would you do with only 3 points?
Still don’t care for the mines. :p Anyways… Steam achievements show me that only 11.1% of all players finished the game. So yay for me!
It is a hard game. I haven’t completely finished it yet myself. Yay you.
Indeed, I have always been a turtle and expand rts player and a few of the mission do not support my preferred style of play.
I’m too much of a perfectionist (or just plain stubborn) to complete a mission without also getting the achievement for it, so I’m stuck on Tension indefinitely.
How twitchy is the game? Do you need to be covering many areas of the map at once or is it a more cerebral RTS?
Its not twitchy but does have some moments where faster clicking helps. That said I hate twitch RTS (Starcraft, Age of Wonders…) and love Infestation so that should tell you something. I’d describe it as a tactical RTS that has the elements of the standard definition RTS. And lastly, the resource points can always be converted so if a strategy doesn’t work and you lose bases you retain the points and just rejig to try a new strategy.
It’s only as twitchy as you want it to be. You can always pause and give orders.
-Tom