Infected

Thursday, 27 December 2007 00:00

Zombie games might seem a bit passé and it's all been done before, but Infected is one that's just that bit different. With New York citizens coming down with a virus that turns them into zombies, it's up to you to go through wave after wave of spleen throwing mutants in a bid to cleanse NYC.

You take the role of Officer Stevens or after you've entered your name, Officer Stevens and your duty as a rookie is to take out all the zombies as you're special, you just happen to have a blood type that's immune to the virus and in fact, one drop will make the zombies explode. This is why you're fitted with a viral weapon that blasts your blood into them after you've shot the crap out of them and make them go pop.

Before you start, you have the chance to completely customize your character with a choice of just four body types to start with and 21 more to unlock as you progress through the game. With 16 types of skin colour, outfit colour and hair colour, you have quite a wide choice of how nice or freaky you want your character to look.

The gameplay is nice and simple, hold down the R trigger to lock onto the zombies, press X to shoot them until they turn red and press square to see them go splat. One thing I kept forgetting was to let go of the trigger button so that I could turn and start shooting in other directions, that meant I would lose a bit too much energy or end up with zombies too close to effectively shoot. That's only a minor quibble as pressing the L trigger would probably be a good idea, seeing as pressing it moves onto the next target.

There's some pretty good humour in there too which kind of reminds you that it's not meant to be a completely serious game, but a more light-hearted, mindless zombie blaster that you should enjoy for the fun of it. Building up combo's is part of the fun when trying to boost your score and get bonuses, but it can be fairly time consuming and part of the task is to clear the stage within a certain time to get a medal as well as cash to buy weapon upgrades.

It's not just a case of wading through swarms of zombies in every mission though, that would be pretty boring and doing the same thing over and over is not an ideal style of gameplay. Kill Em All is where you wade through and wipe them out, but other mission types include having to defend crashed helicopters, clearing areas for helicopters to land and one that will keep you on your toes, a mission where you have to clear the landing zone AND rescue civilians. Although New York City has been overrun with zombies, there are still some unaffected by the virus and need to be gotten out of there, as you might have guessed, it's up to you to go on those rescue missions.

There are also a load of multiplayer options to choose from with game sharing or even online play. Ad-Hoc play allows up to 8 players to choose from 10 maps and game styles Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Savior (rescue as many civ's as poss before time runs out) and Mad Cow which is a kind of hunted style of play. One person is a cow (don't ask why...) and the other players have to find the 'cow' and kill them, then someone else becomes the cow and they become the hunted.

A fun zombie killer with plenty of single player action and multiplayer options, it's a game that should last a while and actually give you a good excuse to play something on your PSP. The soundtrack features songs from Slipknot, Ill Nino and Junkie XL which gives the game the 'atmosphere' needed and some good cut scenes add to the enjoyment. It's certainly one worth checking out if you're after a decent game to play on the PSP as I don't think it would disappoint fans of third-person shooters.

7.5