Comedy cutscenes and multiplayer
Now it’s worth a mention at this point of the between mission sequences, played out with engine generated cutscenes and Amped 3 style low-budget live action sequences. To say that Planet Moon have taken a leaf out of the black humour of zombie movie genre is an understatement. They’ve not only taken a leaf, they’ve nicked the whole book and crammed in every gag they can, with superb results.
Sure, the humour is at times a bit tasteless and I’m sure that The Daily Mail will be running a feature on how humour in games like this is affecting house prices but Planet Moon get a big thumbs up from me for some of the laugh-out-loud moments supplied by Infected. Any game that doesn’t take itself seriously and so brilliantly sends up modern news media and politicians gets my vote.
So now we move onto the multiplayer side of Infected which, according to the press releases before the game came out, featured a mode whereby you’d play wireless against others and, if you won, their PSP would now have your player to contend with in the single player levels. In practise, playing over the net, the variety of multiplayer modes is reduced to just deathmatch with no ranking system to determine who you play against or anyway of playing against a particular person. So unless you go ad hoc with your mate in the same room, you’re unlikely to meet him in multiplayer.
The ad hoc mode has loads going for it with several different game variations, from straight deathmatch through to rescue the hostages. None of these exist over net play though and with the lack of a ranking system, I got my arse handed to me on several occasions. Now this is where Infected gets ambitious as the winning player’s avatar (their customized in-game version of Officer Stevens) can now ‘infect’ the loser’s PSP. What this means is that you’ll have to face that avatar in several single player missions to defeat it… but the really clever bit is that if you go online whilst still ‘infected’ and win, that infected avatar passes to the loser and leaves your system. You can then go on and win another match and start your own avatar infecting everyone. Cool eh? There’s even an online stats system so you can track how far your avatar has spread.
