A very stylish remake. First Impressions

So I started playing Space Invaders Extreme (DS) yesterday. Its a superb mix of old and new with cla$$ic Space Invaders gameplay merged with rythm based influences and mad pickup/powerup mechanics. This game also geta really hard after a while. I am on Stage 3-A at the moment and I cant get past it. This game shows you no mercy. The Invaders will reflect shots, dive down onto you, teleport down to you and some of their shots will split up into multiple shots if you accidently fire at them. The trick to surviving this madness is chaining colors. Much like the mechanic in Ikaruga. If you shoot 4 or more of the same color in a row they drop a powerup that will give you a new and powerful weapon for a few seconds (bombs, a huge laserbeam or multiple shots for example). After those seconds have passed you better be chaining together another color to get another powerup because once you are stuck with your standard cannon the game can turn bad on you really fast.

The other trick to surviving is to nail UFOs that fly past. Some of them can, if certain goals are fulfilled, take you to a "roulette" stage on the top screen where you will shoot at a spinning circle of invaders to get, for example, an extra life or a clone of your ship next to yours. Other UFOs will take you to a bonus round where you have to complete a specific goal and if you succeed you will exit out to the stage you were on again in whats calle d"fever mode" where you can really blast those invaders to pieces for afew seconds and build up a huge combo score. All this is actually rythm based. Its not loosely rythmbased like Rez or E4. This game actually gets easier if you shoot in time with the music. If you press shoot in time with the beat the flow of shots will be much smoother. In addition to this, you can actually fire even faster by making simple melodies that goes with the beat. So you keep a standard beat and then push the shoot button faster a couple of times to create some kind of extra layer of melody on top of the music and youll find yourself taking the invaders down even easier. The melodies you can perform varies with the music.

So the first impression is that this is a really smooth remake of the cla$$ic shooter. Backgrounds looks amazing and it feels very "Extreme". Its super hard and got a really deep system to handle everything that will have you learning the ins and outs of the game to truly get anywhere.