July 14th, 2009

“Holy Invasion” Delivers the Feeling of a Nuts Game

“Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This?” is indeed a name of a game which is exclusively available as a PlayStation Network download and as odd as its title suggests. The style of the game is that of a tower-defense mixing in elements of ecology and labyrinth building in a note of an eccentric humor that brings you at the same time an experience meant to be deeper than any other game of this sort. The goal in this game is to defense yourself against an enemy force by planning the proper units to act against the enemies’ abilities. Your character actually is on the side of the “bad guys” since you play the evil master of demolition with the purpose of protecting a nd serving an evil general and not allow him to be captured by the “good guys”.

You have a den to stay in which is built by digging tiles of soil in order to shape some tunnels and open limited areas. While digging the tiles you may find “nutrients” that once dug out give birth to a slime that is the origin which generates the ecology in Holy Invasion. The tile of soil which is more nutritious delivers a stronger creature the moment it is destroyed. Waiting for it to become white spotted you will see that it will deliver a maggot which maturing becomes a combat fly. Waiting longer will lead to the emergence of a lizard soldier, equipped with shield and sword, that feeds itself with maggots and flies.

You need to figure out the ecosystem of your chart and see how to make even the number of your “soldiers” in your army, thus a number too big of lizards will get them to starvation since they eat many maggots, and in this way the army of the “good guys” will have free entrance into your tunnel. There are present other creatures in the game but they all follow the same pattern of their own behaviors and movements.

In all this time when you try to find ways of managing the movement of forces inside your maze the Holy Invasion seems to make its appearance, but you have to deal with the chaotic behavior of some of your units, for instance the slimes that behave kind of other way around than they are supposed to or they can simply die failing to achieve their mission. In other tower defense games, there are options that allow you to build or purchase a unit, but in here you are left only with the hope that the units would finally end up by doing their job. The thing is that you as a player have to learn all the tricks to get your units to behave as they are supposed to, but as proved nothing is quite that predictable. However the “Holy Invasion” delivers the feeling of a nuts game with its strange kind of humor and the sense of a unique aura turns it into an intriguing tower-defense game style.