Infected
Planet Moon’s trademark humor finally makes its way to the PSP, and it’s a blast.
Published: December 12, 2005
All the levels are divided into neighborhoods called zones connected by subway tunnels. Clearing a particular zone locks it off from more infected moving in – unless they’re berserk, in which case they’ll run anywhere they damn well please, and fast. Locking off zones is especially important when you can’t airlift humans out, because you’ll often have to race all over the map to keep the infection from spreading. If you can’t lift them out, and too many infected take over a level, it goes nuts and swarms of infected start coming at you.
This plays across the game’s three main single-player modes. You’ll still splat zombies, of course, but at times you’ll have to run a little Choplifter action by scooping up humans and taking them to waiting choppers (this had a couple of us screaming “get to da choppah!” as loud as we could for no real reason) or prevent a full-blown infection by keeping infected out of areas with humans that can’t be lifted out. Protect/rescue a set number of humans in a given mission and/or get some serious chained combo attacks and you’ll earn medals.
You’ll need at least bronze to move on, but silver and gold medals get you higher hazard pay, which is then used to unlock stuff like weapons upgrades, grenades, instant full arsenals or points multipliers and so on. The money thing is a nice motivation to earn gold medals at first, but by about the halfway point, you’ll have earned enough to buy everything anyway, and some unlockables are only made available after passing a certain point in the single-player game.
Ad-hoc multiplayer games are more or less team-based versions of the single-player modes save for Mad Cow Mode, which is essentially a game of tag, only the person that’s “it” is... well, a mad weapon-wielding cow. Yes, it’s awesome. Perhaps more awesome, though, is the whole “Infect the World” online mode where you can go up against someone in a deathmatch game. If you win, your character you spent all that time on in the single-player mode infects the other PSP, and unless they clear out your infectioni in more single-player games, they’ll play as your character whenever they go online.
All this is tracked along with detailed stats on your performance, and all of it can be seen online via the PSP’s web browser. It tracks how many people you’ve infected and where (we hit people in Egypt, Japan, Canada, India and plenty of people here in the States). Since the game lists your city and state, you can see how well you’re doing against fellow residents, which is a nice touch.
In fact, the only real down side to matches is that they’re picked at random when you sign on, so you never know who you’re playing and – worst of all – how good their connection is. There’s nothing more aggravating than getting blasted to bits as you spawn because the game’s lagged, and getting pegged while behind cover is even worse. It was a rare occurrence, but still annoying.
