Snailien Invasion! Review

“Snailien Invasion!” is an indie game, which was inspired by the old DOS game “Liero”. Having never played “Liero” before, my first impression of it was that it reminded me of “Worms” – you are a snail armed with four different weapons (which change depending on your class), a grappling hook, a jet pack and a shield, and you have to either work co-operatively or on your own to try and survive wave up on of waves of enemies, or you can play against others – locally or over Xbox Live – in deathmatch, team deathmatch or capture the flag games.

The first time I played the game, I found it very hard to get used to the controls, even after looking them up. The controls are fairly simple in theory – LT to grapple, RT to fire weapon, LS to move, D-pad to change weapons, etc. However, the main thing I struggled with at first was the use of the grappling hook and weapons. Since you control the direction you shoot and grapple in using the RS, I often found myself grappling in the wrong direction and this lead to me falling off the level one too many times! After playing the game for a while though, it got a lot easier to use the controls, and you know where in each level you can grapple on to. The jet pack that you can use is for short bursts only which helps when trying to jump onto higher surfaces.

The majority of the time I played on this game, I have played alone on the ‘drone survival’ game mode. This game mode basically means you have to fight waves of flying enemies with a limited number of lives, and see how long you can survive for. There are 8 different level terrains to choose from which vary from being high in the sky and deep underground. After having some problems with the grappling hook, I often chose the terrain that didn’t have a way for me to fall to my death, which eliminated me losing lives due to suicide! In this survival mode, you start with 6 lives. Every 3^rd wave you get an extra life, every 5^th wave is ‘danger’ and every 10^th wave is a boss wave with much stronger drones. Even though I couldn’t survive many waves, it was a lot of fun to play, and is a very good way to help you earn research points. Research points in the game allow you to unlock new classes of snail and therefore new weapons for the class. What I found extremely useful was the fact that the research points that are required for the next class are displayed on your HUD, and every time you kill an enemy, you see the number decrease.

In the deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag game modes you are able to play with up to 3 other people on a 4-way split screen or you can play on Xbox Live with up to 7 other players. Although I tried a few times to play on Xbox Live with the game to get some multiplayer experience, I couldn’t find a game to join at all, and nobody would join my hosted games. However, I did try a deathmatch game on a 2-way split screen, and thought it was highly enjoyable! It really good fun trying to grapple like mad trying to avoid the other player, and set up traps with the hope that they would fall in to them. Even though there were only 2 of us in the game we tried, I could imagine it being absolute mayhem if there were to be 7 other players you’re trying to keep an eye on!

Overall, I found the game to be thoroughly enjoyable, but repeatitive sometimes. With the little amount of multiplayer I played, I would say that it was very fun and more people being involved would make the experience a lot better. For 240 Microsoft Points, it doesn’t break the bank, and there are definitely hours of gameplay there.

“Snailien Invasion!” is available now to download from Xbox Live Marketplace.