	Robotech: Invasion
	Developer: Vicious Cycle Publisher: Global Star Software Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-8 net play	Words By:
Everyone has a weakness. Something sad or embarrassing you loved from your childhood that you pray none of your relatives bring up at dinner parties. Sadly, my geekiness is my love for a lesser-known anime series called Robotech. Spliced from three completely different Japanese cartoons the Robotech series essentially follows Earth’s discovery of a new system of power called Protoculture. After learning how to work this new spangly power, and make lots of transformable mecha they then proceed to defend the Earth from all manners of alien nasties, who are also after the protoculture. Robotech: Invasion is set in the third era of Robotech (the new generation), where the Invid arrive on Earth to take back the flower of life (which spews out protoculture). The world gets enslaved save for a few resistance fighters, and those who agreed to help the Invid. The cartoon follows a resistance fighter called Scott Bernard and his mates, but the game treads a new path, darting through the storylines of a couple of quite different resistance fighters. You start the game as an amnesia-ridden resistance fighter called Locke, and follow him in first or third-person as he fights his way right to the Invid base - Reflex Point. The storyline has been pretty well thought out, as it stays faithful to the series as well as dabbling in a fair bit of intrigue too, when Locke’s past is (very) slowly revealed through some nice blurry daydream-flashbacks. By the time you finish Locke’s missions there are a lot of unanswered questions. These are sorted in the second set of missions, following in the footsteps of Locke, so using mainly the same levels, but seeing some of the same events from a different angle, hence shedding some light on the story. Right, so the narrative holds fairly true to the fan/s, but what about the gameplay? Well, it’s definitely not quite as polished as I’d have liked, but it’s still pretty smooth. Since the Invid are a pretty badass bunch you’re not just stuck fighting them with a little pea-shooter, you get Cyclone battle armour. This stuff lets you jump and dart about like a fairy, but also lets you transform into a bike for a quick getaway. Sounds cool? Well in the original series it is, but is rather badly implemented here. The agility of the armour stretches to a woefully underpowered double-jump, and everything about the bike makes me want to weep for the cartoon’s producers, as well as the fans. The bike has the worst handling ever seen in a game. The bike will tip over if: 1. You accelerate too fast 2. Touch any rock or bump in the scenery 3. Turn too much in one go. For some reason you can't even ride the bike inside many buildings, even in massively wide structures but it's probably just as well as it has the turning circle of an oil tanker. The weapons on the cyclone are also piss-poor; the missiles never hit their targets, and if they hit, they do minimal damage. And it’s slower than Vanessa Feltz giving John McCririck a piggyback, knee-deep in molasses (hey, it could happen). Granted, it’s an add-on to a pretty good first-person (mainly) engine, but it’s so twitchy that it would have been less offensive to leave the whole bike-transformation out. Halo showed how the first-person/third-person vehicle thing could be done, it’s a shame so few games have done it as well since. All criticism for the bike mode aside, the on-foot gameplay is better than most other complicated control systems, especially on the targeting front. When fighting ickle bandits the game plays like any normal FPS, but when the rather hefty Invid turn up, things get a lot easier. The game gives you a chance to lock onto the huge robots, but still aim within that locked space. This means that while there’s loads of action going on and you’re strafing a shock trooper, you can still make minute adjustments to blow off an arm, or hit the central eye - top stuff. One problem that comes from this however is that things become a tad simple, even on the harder modes. The Invid plod towards you en masse, but sometimes so slowly it’s easy to pick them off before they get close, and even if they do, you can simply lock-on to them and circle-strafe around and around… As for the graphics, they’re not exactly the prettiest, but given what they’re handling, they’re not too shabby, even when fighting multiple enemies over huge maps, and there are very few sections that needed extra loading. The game holds steady most of the time, but if you’re zoomed in on the scope, and there are a lot of enemies around it doesn’t like it and the frame rate drops making sniping difficult. The sound is only a small thing, but is probably the biggest disappointment in the game for me. The orchestral music from the Robotech series is simply lovely, and has some great tunes which would have made the game feel really like you were playing the cartoon. I wept when I found that Robotech: Battlecry had the music, but not the originals - it sounded like it had been remade using a Ł10 keyboard from Argos. The Invasion soundtrack is an even further step away from the series, leaving orchestral music for “pumping house music”, or something… whatever it was, it annoyed me enough to turn the music right down before I got a headache. After you’ve completed the single-player missions and found the unlockable skins, you can try out the online mode. I say try, because you can try to play it, but there won’t be anyone to play it with. Some of the levels are really large (a little too large for only 8 players), and the concept is rather good. If only fans of the series (or any PS2 online shooter fans for that matter) would take advantage of this, and actually play it online I’m sure they’d enjoy it, but we managed to find just three games in days of searching… Like most new games boasting online modes; however good they are, it doesn’t matter if there isn’t anyone online playing them. Robotech: Invasion is a fun first/third-person shooter with a strong storyline, if a little short. It’s also let down by the poor cyclone handling and the fact that very few people, especially in the UK, know what Robotech is, and will most probably pass up this game because of it.