Infected
Planet Moon’s trademark humor finally makes its way to the PSP, and it’s a blast.
Published: December 12, 2005
Through the whole experience, the humor is really what punches through. By the time I’d heard a class tour gone wrong and a news broadcast that cut into a kids show showing bodies piled up in front of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree with a caption that went from “Ornaments!” to “OH-NO-MENTS!” when the reporter found out what programming they’d pre-empted, I was in love.
The conversations you’ll hear before starting a mission are almost always hilarious, littered with expletives and at times go way beyond where you think they’d stop. The only down side to this is that the non-storyline bits are recycled so that by the end of the single-player game, you’ve heard all the throwaway comments a couple times.
Planet Moon decided to go with the RenderWare engine for the game, and it works beautifully. The art style and gameplay are a perfect fit for the middleware solution, and it’s the first real showcase of the technology working well on the PSP across the board. The controls work perfectly when mapped to just a single analog stick, and the framerate, for what it is, stays fairly solid until you get huge combos exploding right in front of you. There isn’t a ton of detail in place for texture work or models, and as mentioned before there aren’t a ton of different enemies (just the same enemies with different weapons), but the art design pulls it all off very, very nicely.
Even the audio, littered with Roadrunner Records artists like Slipknot (who, along with BloodRayne are unlockable skins) and more death metal than you ever throught you’d hear in a game, fit nicely. It was too much for me after a while, but you can kill most of the vocal tracks for instrumental walls of guitar and double-bass. Hell, there are even a few Junkie XL tracks here that play during the menus that haven’t been released anywhere, and they’re fairly great too.
The voice acting for the characters, while fairly minimalist, is what sells the dialogue Planet Moon whipped up. From the news reported filled with false cheer to the city rep trying to hide his inadequacies, all of it is very, very well done.
The whole game is, really, and belongs in more PSPs. The fact that we have trouble finding games so often online shows that the game is certainly in need of a few more sales, and so long as you can appreciate the humor and enjoy pure arcade shooting, there’s really no reason not to pick this game up.
