(Originally posted on April 11th)
Back in 2011, Atari wanted to reboot their classic arcade game, Centipede, by making it about humans defending Earth from bugs. It's easy to laugh at any gritty reboot, but we should at least give it a chance first, and besides, some chance of quality can be seen when you see who developed the game. The development studio Wayforward has made quality games in the past, and even now, being most known for the Shantae series. With that being said, it’s time to look at this game, starting with the story, and presentation.
The story is very simple. The plot is that large, possibly mutated bugs have invaded Earth, You play as Max Maximillion Riot, or just called Max, and help this girl named Maisy Chambers. Maisy has magical seeds that give the earth vegetation to continue support, so it’s your job to go to her garden, fighting the bugs along the way. That’s the entire plot, from the 5 hours I put into this game. How does the game present this story? Well if you like Windows Movie Maker video editing, you will enjoy this game. The cutscenes are poorly animated, but most of the story is presented with still characters, on a background, talking. The voice acting is fine, it just could’ve been louder, but you can thankfully enable subtitles. It’s not too bad, but the presentation could’ve been better. but the game is more about the gameplay.
The gameplay. The game is a run n game shooter, similar to Smash TV. You run around the circle pad and can shoot in the 8 directions, using the face buttons. Now wait, the 3DS only has four face buttons, how can you shoot in 8 directions? Well, you can push 2 face buttons to shoot in “corner directions.” What I mean by this, is that if you hold X and A, you shoot in the upright position, and the same is true with the other corner directions. I don’t like this, because when I’m in the hit of actions, I sometimes accidentally push two buttons at the same time, and short the wrong way. You can push the left trigger to do a shockwave that's pretty useless. There are also powerups you can collect, and you enable those via the touch screen.
The powerups are nice. There are a lot of them including a faster shot, a flame thrower, ice thrower, spread shot, laser beam, a lame electric gun, and more. These powerups have 2 levels, and the 2nd level is obviously better. The powers up are fun to use and can be helpful in dire situations. You can get turrets, by killing certain bugs. The turrets make the game much easier, maybe even too easy. You don’t have to try much when you have turrets.
The stages are usually just waves of bugs attacking, and then after you can kill them all, you win. This is fun, but in short bursts, and that's my main problem with the game. The game is very repetitive and doesn't change things up often. They try to change it a few times, there are stages that you need to activate power boxes and stages that you need to defend Maisy, but these aren't very common, just two of each in the 5 hours I put into the game. These levels don’t even change a lot anyway, it’s just the same thing, except with extras added. There is one level that I need to highlight because it changes up the gameplay, level 20, Wasteland Stroll introduces toxic floor. When you stand on the toxic floor, a meter goes down. Once the meter drains, you take damage. The idea is that you have to shoot purple bugs to make a part of the floor nontoxic, so you can walk on it. This is unique, and sandfly out the 22 levels I got to, this is only one to do this.
The game also has a problem with difficulty. The game has difficulty spikes, as in one level is hard, and then the other 5 after it are easy. Boos fight 2, the Queen Wasp is stupid. The Queen attacks with needles, you should stay still to dodge them, but there are also wasps that home in on you, making you move. I had to abuse invincibility frames, and a trick to rapid-fire to win. Then the stages after it until level 22, are easy.
I don’t hate Centipede Infestation, I thought it was going to be worse than it was, but the game does have it’s problems. I can only recommend this game to people who love run n game shooters, for people who are fascinated with Centipede. I think the original arcade Centipede is better than Centipede Infestation.
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