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Good, clean fun, well, maybe not clean. Planet Moon’s Infected for PSP takes advantage of our desire to simply shoot masses and masses of zombies. The game does a pretty good job of accomplishing what it sets out to do, though we would have liked a more thorough adventure and multiplayer mode.
In Infected, you’ll play as Officer Stevens in a Christmas-time New York City. Everything seems fine as the game gives you a glimpse of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree before you notice a number of zombies come in and tear the place apart. The game’s story doesn’t take itself seriously and frequently mocks New York tourists, the Christmas spirit and the mentally retarded, making for some awkward “is it okay to laugh?” moments. Thankfully, Stevens is immune to the virus that is turning everyone into zombies. The game lets you customize Stevens by allowing you to pick his character model and first name. As you progress through the game, you can unlock Bloodrayne from Majesco’s key series and members of the band Slipknot, who contribute to the soundtrack.
The gameplay isn’t particularly complex since all you really have to do is kill zombies in the game’s 35 missions. The game has a number of zombies, ranging from aggressive, hyper zombies to more intelligent, gun-carrying versions, and the typical slow, dumb zombies. The game lets you waste them with a number of weapons including rocket launchers, chainsaws and viral guns. The lock-on targeting of the game is very easy to use and makes laying these zombies into a fairly stressfree procedure. You’re also able to pull off combos, since the blood of the zombies damages other, nearby zombies allowing you to get rid of many of them in a relatively quick manner. Aside from shooting things, the game has you helping some civilians though it quickly turns back to a shoot fest. The shooting itself is frantic and satisfying so this isn’t really a problem.
Infected includes both local and online multiplayer. The local multiplayer includes support for up to eight players and includes many different modes including deathmatch, team deathmatch, savior (where you need to take civilians to helicopter evacuation points), and mad cow (sort of like capture the flag instead with a mad cow costume instead of a flag). The online support is far less robust. You can only play against one other player and only deathmatch is available. Winning in multiplayer lets you infect the other player’s PSP, which essentially means that your character will appear in their game.
The game’s visuals are adequate. The environments do their job pretty well, accurately showing the riot that is New York City at this time. The character models are decent, though they aren’t very detailed and repeat way too often. That said, the simple graphics helps keep the framerate high even though the game throws an insane amount of enemies at you. This makes the tradeoff seem pretty fair.
The game’s audio is also satisfactory. The soundtrack is quite angry consisting of metal and electronica from bands like Slipknot and Pimp X. The sound effects accurately relay the frantic action that is going on, with plenty of people screaming and the constant groans of zombies. The voice acting is decent, though nothing special.
Infected is a fun little game that does what it set out to do. Thanks to the controls, shooting masses of zombies is pretty fun. The frantic gameplay keeps up throughout the game’s length, though it only checks in at a disappointing five or so hours. That’s the major drawback of Infected, though a more robust online mode would have been appreciated. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Nov 30, 2005
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