In an industry obsessed with spin-offs, it's amazing that this took so long: a Space Invaders game in which puny humans get to control the Invaders themselves. In the same year that the franchise celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, Space Invaders Get Even! lets you indulge in a spot of role reversal, giving us the chance to cruise above the cities of Earth and raze everything in sight.
Speaking of anniversaries, Get Even! likes to remind us of its awesome heritage. As you descend on the opening level, a stage in which you have to take down four Tokyo Towers, the in-jokes are already coming thick and fast. "These are the Space Invaders! We drove them off thirty years ago!" bellows the voice of one human commander. "Our unit isn't equipped to take on 2D targets!" quips another. These nudge-wink lines pop up everywhere, and are just a few of many nods to the past. Being a nostalgic old fool, I liked this.
As in the 1978 original, the Space Invaders in Get Even! double up as a weapon and as a means of protecting the mother ship, which you steer with the Nunchuk's analog stick. Up to 100 Invaders surround your craft at any moment, and while these can be downed by enemy fire, shaking the Wiimote and Nunchuk will (slowly) replenish your fleet of assistants. Pointing your Wiimote at the screen and pressing the A button will send a portion of your Invaders to attack the designated spot, and this provides the game with its main trade-off: while your Invaders are busy demolishing a skyscraper or a tank (adding valuable extra seconds to the clock), your mother ship temporarily loses part of its defensive barrier, and needs to dodge enemy fire (which knocks off seconds).
It's a little more complex than that, obviously. As well as a screen-wiping special attack, you also have five standard shots to choose from (Standard, Bomb, Bounce, Drill, and Homing), each of which is more effective against certain enemies (for example, the Drill shot, in which your Invaders form the shape of a drill and literally bore into enemies, works a treat against ships). Using the most deadly attack in a given situation will help bump up your Technical Bonus, and this brings me to why you would play Space Invaders Get Even!: like every other Space Invaders title ever, this is solely about chasing high scores.
I mention this because the Starter Pack that you purchase for 500 points (three extra packs of DLC are available for 500 points apiece, taking the full game to a whopping 2,000 points) is incredibly meager, and I don't want anybody to get a nasty surprise from this. It took me twenty minutes (and only one retry) to complete the two levels and one boss that you receive from the start.
As it happens, such brevity is forgivable. After all, playing and replaying the same stages to perfection is pretty much how all shmups work, and so three levels for $5 or £3.50 is passable value. Gradius had just seven stages, and Ikaruga only five, and while what is on offer here really is the bare bones of a game, paying 500 points to find out you dislike a short game is a heck of a lot better than paying 1,500 for a bloated title you don't enjoy (for this review, I purchased one of the additional mission packs, giving me nine levels in total, and the rad Classic ship. Not bad for 1,000 points, and the missions -- abduct cows, take down battleships, follow a "mysterious light" -- are all nicely varied. Oh, and it's a colossal game if you download everything: I made it 681 blocks of memory!).
Overall, I really liked Space Invaders Get Even!. Although not a world-beater in its genre, it is a balanced and enjoyable shmup with rock-solid mechanics and the right amount of variety, and the presentation is excellent throughout -- I particularly loved the chunky 3D models and the onomatopoeic comic-book style bubbles (Pkow!) that litter the action. If I had to point out flaws, the soundtrack eventually irked me a little, and gauging which weapons work best on which enemies isn't all that intuitive.
I suspect this game will divide people, so let me put it another way: if you like the idea of slogging your way through the same stage over and over again and uploading your best scores to an online leaderboard -- in other words, if you like shmups -- you should buy it. If you don't find replaying levels a barrel of laughs, you'll probably hate this. I'm in the former camp, so it gets an eight. If you're in the latter, knock two or three points off the score.
Final score: 8/10
We're always looking for new games to enjoy. We've got plenty of other WiiWare reviews, if you're into that kind of thing.. If you're so crazy that you want to go to the store and buy something when you could be playing World of Goo or Mega Man 9, we can help with that, too.
