Rating (out of 10)

★★★★

Overview

Infested Planet is a mix of realtime and node-based strategy games. There are a number of bases on the screen which provide you with resources when captured. The enemy grows stronger through 'mutations' when you capture bases.

Positive (good features)

✔ You can give orders when the games is paused, like in many RPGs. I wish StarCraft had that option, it makes the game more accessible.

✔ The game is quite fun at first, when you still feel you're improving.

✔ Precise interface scaling.

Neutral (average/expected features)

♦ Decent variety of units and buildings.

♦ You can buy single-mission boosts (e.g. an extra sniper) if you really have a problem with a mission.

♦ You can replay missions or play random missions to get money.

Negative (bad features)

✖ The campaign is rather short.

✖ You have to grind to buy newly revealed units and buildings.

✖ Only 3 different defensive towers.

✖ There is almost no variety in enemies. There's the usual swarm, suicide swarm and shooty swarm - that's about it.

✖ Research buildings look identical and can't be told apart when close together. They don't even show their name when you click on them.

✖ Easy difficult isn't easy, it's comparable to Normal in other games.

✖ Poor mission balance. The one where the enemy gets endless free infected marines is a nightmare.

✖ While there are a variety of units, you generally don't get to use them much because their cost is prohibitively high.

✖ After a handful of missions you feel you're getting weaker compared to the enemy.

✖ Randomly generated missions can be overly difficult due to the poor algorithm.

✖ You can't zoom in far enough to actually see what's going on. Good luck telling your troops apart or differentiating enemy units.

✖ Giant messages constantly obscure the action. You have to pause and wait for them to go away to be able to see the map.

Conclusion

While Infested Planet has a few interesting ideas it gets boring because of the lack of variety and frustrating because you have to grind to improve.

Details

⯍ Experience with genre: I've been playing strategy games since Dune 2 (1992).

⯍ Experience with game: Completed the campaign.

⯍ Recommended to: People who don't get frustrated by unbalanced, repetitive gameplay.