Space Invaders Extreme certainly plays like an extreme version of the 1978 classic shooter. To enjoy this game however, you have to enjoy old school shooters, be slightly masochistic (though I suppose those go hand in hand), and you also have to have a high tolerance for trippy colors and flashy effects.

At first glance, this game might just seem like a highly stylized version of Space Invaders. You’re still on the bottom of the screen, they’re still on the top, and coming downward to ruin your day, slowly. That much hasn’t changed. There is much more going on than just that though. The order in which you eliminate enemies significantly impacts your arsenal. Kill four blue aliens in a row, and you get a continuous blue energy beam that can clear a screen of enemies in no time flat. If you kill four red enemies you get an exploding bomb-like shot, which also, destroys enemies rather quickly. The green enemies grant you a “broad” shot, which is much more effective than your standard weapon, but not quite as amazing as the beam and bombs. You also get a shield for killing a grey enemy 4 times in a row, but they appear infrequently, and the shield isn’t terribly effective. Either way, if you obtain one of these weapons (besides the shield) your enemies are basically as good as dead, regardless of which one you get. It adds more strategy to the standard Space Invaders formula of “shooting those dudes before they get to the bottom of the screen” and more “shooting four of those dudes in a row quickly, so I can waste everybody on the screen.” The game balances these new weapons out with a time limit on each, ranging from pretty short on the blue laser, to slightly less short on the green broad shot, with the red bomb being somewhere in the middle. They all last only a couple seconds anyway, so the slight difference in time isn’t huge, but does make a difference in the amount of enemies you’ll kill when you’re hammering the shoot button. It’s much easier, obviously, to just use those super weapons instead of using your single shot blaster (which does shoot faster than in the classic game,) so trying to get those 4 important combo kills as opposed to shooting everything oh so slowly with that puny little starting laser of yours essentially becomes the bulk of the game. Don’t get me wrong though, these weapons by no means make the game any easier. You’ll feel pretty confident the first couple stages, until it branches off and lets you choose if you want to go to the easy version of the next stage, or the hard version. A normal option would have been nice, because the game will just lie down for you otherwise. The hard mode though, as it implies, is hard. Lasers will be everywhere, dive-bombing enemies will be frequent, and you’ll constantly be overwhelmed. You definitely have to at least be decent in the shoot em’ up genre to go anywhere.

Much of this difficulty comes from the varied amount of enemies you’ll face. Your opposition gets increasingly complex and crazy. You have your classic suicidal kamikaze types, your stay back and shoot while slowly moving left to right types, and everything in between. Enemies will explode and spawn 4 more enemies in their wake, shoot lasers that explode into even more lasers, shielded enemies, there really are countless amounts of enemy types and you never know what you’ll be up against next. Shooting flying saucers that loom over the enemies net you extra points, or sometimes sends you into a mini-game like mode where you have to do any number of things. They usually involve shooting a bunch of enemies of a certain color, or a spinning roulette wheel with one certain enemy you need to hit. Successfully completing one of these challenges sends you into “fever” mode, where you get an even broader much more powerful version of the broad shot that lasts considerably longer. Every stage you fight a boss, which is essentially a giant version of the normal enemies, with slight variations on each. It usually has to do with the way they must be killed, like hitting a weak point or something like that. They aren’t where most of the challenge comes from, but they aren’t a pushovers either.

This is one of the most visually appealing games on the PSP, or for any system for that matter. Everything has a very “clean” look to it even when everything starts exploding. Everything blows up really nice, much like Geometry Wars, and there are pretty cool looking background effects (which can be turned off if it’s too “radical” for you). The lasers look pretty basic, but it fits in very nicely with everything else. The visuals are a real high point of the game, as is the music. The beat is fast and furious, and the sound your laser makes changes with the beat of the music. One of the best video game soundtracks for a shooter in recent memory, and it really actually adds a certain “flow” to the game play. The flashy visuals and trippy music really goes with the random and crazy game play that the rest of the game has in ample supply. Everything just fits.

Space Invaders is a unique experience. It’s much like Pacman: Championship Edition in relation to the original Pacman. It does all the basics the original game did right, but it does enough different to stand on its own. This isn’t a game for everyone though. If you don’t like shoot em’ ups, especially Space Invaders, this probably isn’t for you. Everyone else with even a minor interest in a totally revamped revision of Space Invaders, should get ready to send those invaders back to space.

5 out of 5