Preamble


Visual: 3.5/5
In true spirit of the source material, the graphics are incredibly simple. A space ship'y looking design represents the player's vehicle and enemy attack ships are drawn straight out of geometry class. Your bullets are rectangles, they shoot diamonds at you, and planets are as round as ever. It's like the classic Space Invaders was given a major graphical upgrade.

There is a problem with clutter, though. Maybe there was a shortage of ideas at the time as to how to fill empty space, and unfortunately the best option wasn't the one chosen. Some gameplay-irrelevant doodads are scattered about the screen; animated no less, so they're guaranteed to draw your attention away from the action at least once. One of them even looks like a health or experience bar, but I've since concluded that it's just screen junk. I'm pretty sure, anyway.

Audio: 4/5
Trance? Techno? I'm not well versed in this field of music genres so I don't know exactly what's it's called. I do know that it's catchy and compliments the gameplay nicely.
Meanwhile, the sound effects are badass. Your lasers go "pew", enemies burst when they get die, and the bomb feels like an actual bomb going off. It all makes for a satisfying space blasting experience.

Storyline: 3/5
As soon as 'New Game' is selected, we're treated to an infodump of epic proportions. The wall of text thrown in the player's face is probably longer than this review, and the funniest part is, you can summarize the whole thing as "Humans expanded into space and didn't find intelligent life... until now!"
So yeah. Humans are getting their ass kicked and, as usual, the fate of mankind rests on the shoulders of a single fighter ship and all the pew pew it can dish out.

The rest of the plot progresses in small blurbs. Referencing the screenshot below, on the right side are two sentences generally telling you why this batch of enemies is different from the last batch. As you can see by the phrase "Let's expel the space garbage out of our system", political correctness has been set aside in a time of war. Nothing like a little interplanetary racism to de-humanize your enemy.



Gameplay: 3/5
Here's a funny question : Have you ever played Space Invaders?
We all know what it's about. Space ship on the bottom, aliens up top, and the two sides blasting each other in between. But how many people are actually familiar with how the game works?

Basically, there's a big block of enemies at the top of the screen. They move, as a group, horizontally back and forth. Once they touch the left or right wall, the whole stack will move down a notch, slowly inching their way into the player's turf and Game Overing him when they get there. As you might imagine, the trick is to knock out the side columns of enemies first, making their horizontal travel path slightly longer, thereby giving you more time to finish off the entire group.
That's exactly how Space Resistance works too.

Otherwise, there are some features added to the Space Invaders flavor. As you get kills, you accumulate Bonus Points (named as such) which can be spent on helpful features via hotkeys. You can speed up your ship, double your rate of fire temporarily, fire a big ass bomb like I love to do, raise a shield, or buy a 1UP.

So what are the flaws? Well, the included Survival Mode is silly on both ends of the spectrum : The first 20 waves can be dealt with by leaving Auto-fire on and walking away from the computer, whereas the last 10 waves are virtually unbeatable.
Then there's the fact that, hey, it's 2014, and this is a Space Invaders clone.
We're so spoiled.

Overall: 3/5
This is Space Invaders with a 21st century overhaul. Some further improvements could yet be made, but Space Resistance is a valiant effort, well constructed, and fun to play.