Publisher: ActionSoft
Developer: ActionSoft
System requirements: Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 (or Mac OSX 10.4); 1.2 GHz processor (1.8 GHz recommended); 160 MB RAM; approximately 45 MB of hard drive space.
Genre: Arcade Shooter
Release date: Available now
Review by: Marcus Spears

I don’t always know what to expect from a game when I review it. When I get a new assignment, I deliberately avoid reading anyone else’s opinions; that way it’s easier for me to check my expectations at the door to make sure that I give a fair, unbiased evaluation. But with Insectoid, I knew exactly what to expect. ActionSoft’s goal was to create a Galaga-inspired game for anyone who grew up playing classic arcade shooters and remembers when arcade games actually cost only one quarter to play. I’m happy to say the developer has succeeded on every count.

For five centuries there has been peace between mankind and the Qu’roth. Five days ago, for no reason, the Qu’roth launched a full-scale attack on 24 human-occupied worlds. The humans counter-attacked, and you have been tasked to deliver one of four advanced fighters to the front lines. On the way, however, you get sucked into a wormhole, deep behind enemy lines. Though you are a young commercial pilot with no military training, you have an unexpected opportunity to catch the Qu’roth off guard by destroying their leaders.

You start the game by selecting one of four ships. Each has a different movement speed, bullet speed, and a unique ability that can be activated after collecting a certain number of power cores, which are dropped when some enemies are shot. For example, the Striker 2000 has a shield that protects it from all harm for a few seconds, while the Neutron Cannon LX fires a laser beam that destroys almost anything it hits in one shot. Like most arcade shooters, there are power-ups you can target that give you temporary split-fire or rapid fire, or multiply the score of anything you hit for a few seconds.

You begin with seven lives, with a bonus life earned for every 50,000 points. Your goal is to clear the Qu’roth out of five star systems, each of which has 10 levels. Two of these are bonus levels, which are good for 500 to more than 10,000 bonus points, and the last one is a boss level (ironically, I found the boss levels to be easier than most of them). The others have unique names that often evoke some idea of the behavior and/or type of enemies you face. Each type of enemy attacks with a different pattern, so it’s useful to memorize them. Contact with an enemy, their bullets, or environmental hazards (like some asteroids) causes you to lose a life. Lose all your lives and it’s game over, but you don’t have to start back at the beginning; there is a checkpoint midway through each system. You have the option to continue the game from that point with seven more lives, though your score is reset to zero.

Are there any flaws in this arcade-era goodness? A minor one. When I first ran the game, my monitor immediately went into power-saving mode, though I could tell the game was running because I could hear the music. A quick examination of the console.log file that the game creates revealed the problem. The game defaulted to the maximum resolution of my video card, which is higher than my monitor can handle. Manually editing the configuration file to change the resolution was a snap.

Overall, what do you get when you buy Insectoid? Fifty levels of high-resolution graphics, a professional music score that reminds me of some of my favorite Apogee games, fast-paced adrenaline-fueled gameplay, and non-stop fun that takes you back to the days when you could spend hours in the arcade on a few bucks, all for a bargain price of $19.95.

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