Where to get it

2014 · Indie · Real-time strategy

Infested Planet

Command a team of 5 elite soldiers against an alien horde of 100,000. Surrounded on all sides, you must outmaneuver and outsmart the enemy.

Released: 6 March 2014
Platforms: Windows macOS
Genres: Indie Real-time strategy Strategy Tactical Tower defense
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Action Science fiction
Age ratings: USK 16
Languages: English
Time to beat: 7hmain story17hcompletionist

About

Infested Planet is a real-time strategy video game developed and published by Rocket Bear Games.

›Story

The enemy is closing in around you. Your soldiers are being flanked and the perimeter is slowly collapsing under a vicious alien assault. Robotic turrets will not last much longer. Just a little more and the bugs will swarm into your unprotected base. What are your orders?

You order your soldiers to fall back to a defensive chokepoint and rebuild your defenses. Sacrifice the forward squads to gain some extra time. Gather your team while equipping them with flamethrowers and laser guns. Start building a siege cannon for fire support. Then, while the aliens are busy, flank their main hives to destroy and capture them.

You have just pulled off a tactical victory - but there's no time to rest. The aliens are constantly mutating. One moment your shotguns are ripping through the horde, the next the aliens grow hard, bullet-proof armour. You must adapt as well. Equip your team with stealth suits, miniguns, grenade launchers - your commands will decide the battle's outcome.

Players say

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The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Players control a group of four mercenaries. They are tasked with clearing tens of thousands of hostile insectoid creatures from an alien planet. These enemies randomly gain different special abilities, which forces players to adapt. To counter this, players can re-outfit their characters at will.

On the highest difficulty levels and the endgame level, enemies dynamically adapt to the player's strategies, so if players frequently use flame throwers, new enemies with longer-range attacks or knockback effects may appear. To defend land that they've captured, players can set automated defenses, which introduce a tower defense mechanic.

Development

Alex Vostrov made Infested Planet mostly by himself. Vostrov was inspired by Red Alert 2 and his frustrations with other real-time strategy games, which he found were often easily won by patiently out-building the computer players. Vostrov wanted to design a game where opponents would rush the player. Infested Planet is Vostrov's first release after he became a full-time game developer. It left early access on March 6, 2014.

Reception

Infested Planet received positive reviews on Metacritic. Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun described it as a Starship Troopers-inspired video game that successfully mimics the film. He said the gameplay is a "mash-up of shooter and RTS" that can satisfy fans of both genres, but he found the game's relentlessness frustrating. GameSpot's reviewer, Nathan Meunier, wrote that the game's "well-balanced and absorbing gameplay" overcomes the stereotypical plot.

He said that it is "brutally tough at moments but always fair". At PCGamesN, Julian Benson called Infested Planet "the most subversive game of 2014", introducing constant stalemates and challenges that need to be overcome in different ways.