Vital Stats

Genre: Shooter

Players: 1

Online: OpenFeint

Developer: Taito

Publisher: Taito

ESRB Rating: E

Release Date: 7/27/09

Platforms

• iPhone
• PSN
• XBLA

Infinity Gene makes a lot of noise about evolution, but its real strength is adaptation. Specifically adaptation to the iPhone. Outside that, it delivers a fairly straightforward shooter with snappy pacing and an unobtrusive tutorial. The occasional cheap death chafes a bit, but there’s more than enough good stuff here to gloss over a few minor flaws.

Kill The Weak
A touch screen makes a pretty lousy button. More accurately, it makes a perfectly good single button, but adding more will run you into trouble. The screen gives you the same tactile feedback no matter where you press, so if you want to know what button you’re pressing, you have to look at your hands.

This problem is normally unavoidable for an iPhone shooter. Action-fests are frustrating as you look away from the play field and succumb to cheap deaths. Mitigate the problem with slow pacing, and your shooter will plod bravely into tedium. It seems like a no win situation, but Taito has worked out a solution they call Space Invaders: Infinity Gene.

The nutshell is this: eliminate the shoot button and replace it with autofire. The instant you do that, all the problems with iPhone shooters just fall away. It frees you up to concentrate on piloting your craft, which comes in handy when the game starts looking like bullet hell. You’d probably just mash the fire button anyway, so really the only thing this costs the genre is repetitive stress injuries.

This isn’t terribly busy.

Favor the Strong
Thus freed from the tyranny of buttons, Infinity Gene is free to focus on delivering the qualities that make retro shooters fun. The action flies thick in the game’s roughly 50 levels. Enemies pop in and out of combat every few seconds: swooping in, descending from above, and outright teleporting. There’s actualy a bit of trouble with the last one, because an untelegraphed enemy makes an unavoidable death. However it’s all in the service of keeping the action chaotic, and a surfeit of unlockable extra lives helps take out the sting.

No buttons means no alternate weapons, so Infinity Gene has you pick your favorite from a list of 7 weapons at the start of each level. Most are reliable shooter fare–rapid fire/homing/gravity–though the “round” weapon works less well. It’s an orbital turret that shoots opposite your movement. This sort of weapon works best with precise and unambiguous control input. Dragging your ship around a 3 inch screen with your fat finger doesn’t exactly qualify.

That said, Infinity Gene deserves credit for solving the opaque finger problem, even if regular exercise is the only solution to the fat finger problem. You aren’t required to touch your ship to move it. Instead, it tracks your finger’s relative position. So if you place your finger a half inch away from your ship, you can direct it without compromising visibility.

Neither is this.

The major feature that completes Infinity Gene‘s iPhone integration is a procedural level generator that analyzes your music to make new levels. The game actually consists of modular set pieces: waves of enemies that can be stitched together in any order to make a level. The level generator uses your song to determine where to put the seams. This means that once you’ve tired of Infinity Gene’s core level design, there’s still a free play mode that’s limited only by your music collection.

The novelty doesn’t last forever–there are only so many set pieces and you’ll come to recognize each one–but it significantly extends the life of the game. Also, picking the song for a level is a way to determine how long you’ll play, which is a handy portability feature. Sadly, you can’t bookmark songs that make particularly good levels, though that’s to be expected because Infinity Gene has no control over what songs are on your phone from day to day.

Vestigial Traits
There are a couple of hitches that could still improve Infinity Gene‘s portability. The tutorial that gradually introduces new weapons and game concepts is masquerading as an experience system. This means that when you upgrade your iPhone OS and it wipes your saved progress, it’ll re-lock everything you’ve opened. There’s also no suspend feature. The game pauses when you sleep your phone, but exiting the application will cost your your progress through a level. Stages are short and application backgrounding largely obviates the problem, but there was probably a more graceful way to handle that. Finally, Infinity Gene is fairly memory-hungry, and so is susceptible to slowdown and intermittent stalling on older generation iPhones.

There’s also a disagreeable design decision in that the selectable difficulty levels aren’t hugely different. Infinity Gene follows the “more bullets mean more challenge” philosophy. So normal mode is a busy dogfight with aggressive enemies, easy enemies can’t always remember where the trigger is, and hard foes will keep shooting you even as they die. This philosophy isn’t exactly wrong, but it does mean that the difficulty modes do nothing to ease the relentless appearance of still-perfectly-lethal enemies all over the screen. Even without ranged attacks, there are 15-30 deadly things on the iPhone’s tiny screen at any given moment. Casual gamers looking to try the genre on for size may be turned off by all the visual chaos.

Dominant Gene
Infinity Gene is one of the few action games on the iPhone that really works. It remixes classic shooter design to favor the advantages of touch control without compromising the challenge and frenetic action that defines the genre. The biggest winners here are genre fans: this is easily the most portable shooter today, and a solid one to boot. However hardcore gamers can still love the nostalgia that Taito is getting so good at, and the music-linked level generator extends the game’s life considerably. Casual gamers may not have much love for the difficulty scaling, but can appreciate that what they see is what they get.

What It Costs: $5

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $10 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $15 (buy)
•To The Casual: $3 (try the demo first)