Review #405: Hidden Invasion

 The hidden invasion of bad games.

 Welcome to 'How not to make a beat'em up 101'. That's the fastest and easiest way to describe this travesty.

 You pick your character, generic dude bro cop or generic sexy woman cop and must battle the aliens that managed to invade earth and take control of most of the population. Both characters play more or less the same, but at least their cutscenes get different voice overs and both characters change clothes three times throughout the entire, and mercifully short, adventure. There's a two player mode, in case you're a dick and want to sucker someone into enduring this with you.

 Both characters can punch, kick, grab, shoot and grenade their way through endless waves of enemies, but you'll quickly find out that the best ways to deal with enemies is using their own guns or exploiting the overpowered grabs and throws. And why wouldn't you? Enemies respawn constantly, gang up on you constantly and love to get in some cheap hits when you're busy. Bosses can be particularly annoying when playing by yourself, since enemies may respawn infinitely even during boss fights.

 You'll be permanently under a timer for no reason whatsoever besides pissing off the players, and while I never ran out of time, it's a needless annoyance. Usually you'll be given a compass to guide you on where to go next, but it's absolutely useless and changes direction more often than the camera. Oh, the camera is absolutely nuts, it changes angles ever 2-3 steps which messes with the controls and how you're moving, so you might get stuck between angles until you figure out how to deal with the controls.

 That's got nothing on the numerous bugs and glitches though! Certain enemies have the ability to 'lock' your progression until you kill them, kinda like older beat'em ups in which the scrolling would freeze until you defeated every enemy. Well, turns out that some of these enemies can move you by moving away from you and thus moving the 'invisible wall'. It's particularly prevalent during stage 2, in which enemies would move by position as they fell down when I shot at them! And this one time, one of these 'screen lock' enemies decided to escape away from me, moving me around until it finally got me stuck on a crate, leaving me unable to progress. Fun.

 Avoid Hidden Invasion. I know, it's very tempting since the game is dirt cheap, I got my copy for 2 bucks. 2 bucks! But not even the multiplayer mode is worth it. Not only is the game not fun to play, it's also filled with bugs, glitches and inconsistencies, it's not even 'so bad it's good' bad. This game is better left off hidden in the annals of history... for our own sake.
 2.0 out of 10