Stupid invaders pc download

Review

With all the talk of adventure games being a dying genre, it's worth noting that several titles have been released recently, and more are in the works. While the titles aren't as prolific as in years past, gamers have still seen the release of such excellent works as Escape From Monkey Island and The Longest Journey. Unfortunately, Xilam and Ubi Soft have decided to add Stupid Invaders to the list of titles in the shrinking genre, so perhaps death isn't such a bad choice after all.Years ago, five aliens crash-landed on Earth. Etno, Candy, Bud, Stereo and Gorgious hid in a deserted house until the spacecraft was repaired, and finally that time has come. The player's job is to guide the five until they can return to their home planet while trying to evade the evil Dr. Sakarine and his hitman. Stupid Invaders is a traditional adventure game, with puzzles of the "use X on Y" variety that adventure gamers are familiar with, and the interface -- a hand that changes to show what is possible with an object -- is easy to understand. The bottom of the screen also explains what something is and whether the alien can interact with it, but is occasionally inconsistent, especially when indicating movement. Most of the time it would show "Go here" or "This way" or such when it was possible to change screens, but sometimes the words weren't there and other times clicking them did nothing. The only way to get the alien to go to that side of the screen was to walk it until it moved close enough to "catch" the words.

The graphics are absolutely stunning. Colorful and quirky, the game looks better than most Saturday morning cartoon series. The integrated cinematics alone are almost worth the price of the game, and each of the more than 500 game screens is perfect in style. To complement the graphics, the music and sound effects add ambience fitting to the area. In a laboratory, the music is reminiscent of a 1950s science fiction movie, while an elevator has, appropriately enough, elevator music. The voice acting is also top-notch, a difficult feat in gaming made more so by the dim-witted nature of the aliens and by dialog of such caliber as, "Your butthole is going to take me back to my planet."

The humor in the game is hit or miss, either laugh-out-loud funny or grimacingly bad. In fact, some of the jokes would probably make Beavis and Butthead cringe in disgust, and one, an implied rape, is disturbing. As a general rule of thumb, players who think the funniest thing Jim Carrey has ever done is his butt-talking routine will likely find Stupid Invaders right up their alley.

At the heart of any adventure title is its puzzles, and Stupid Invaders does the job sufficiently most of the time. Some of the puzzles are very easy to solve, especially for anyone even remotely familiar with the genre. Others require some thought, and those are the most enjoyable. Too bad so many of the puzzles require random guessing and pixel-hunting, taking the fun out of solving them. Even worse, and by far the most annoying aspect of the entire game, is that many actions will kill the alien and end the game. That's right, an adventure game that kills, although in quite amusing ways. Most of the time it's impossible to know that a particular action will end the game until it's too late, so excessive use of saving is actually necessary to keep from repeating sections. This fear of death definitely cuts down on the exploration and "try anything" approach to adventure gaming that most players are familiar with. It's almost as if the developers wanted to punish players for playing their game. This is the primary reason that Stupid Invaders gets a Miss instead of a Hit.

Some small problems contribute to this lackluster title. Reloading and saving are done with the F1 and F2 keys respectively. Players who jump right into the game without reading the manual may not learn this until it's too late. Towards the end, the game crashed to the desktop several times, but never in the same spot twice. Some of the characters the aliens can interact with have dialog options to choose from, but after going through all the options once, if players accidentally click on the character again, they have to go through every one of the options again. Finally, for a four-CD game, it's too short. It's possible to finish the game in fewer than 15 hours. Overall, Stupid Invaders is an adventure title that just isn't as much fun as it should be. But it's plenty stupid. -- DailyRadar Review