I almost hit my ps2 with a machete.....
I had a little skit planned out for this video where I would hit my PS2 with a big machete because this game was so bad. A little over the top? Yes. But it would have deserved it.
Hidden Invasion is currently one of the worst games I've played. It's worse than
Dragon Ball Z Sagas. That game tried. It suffers from the same problems as
Hidden Invasion, but it tried to stand out and was executed a bit better.
I originally did plan on making a list video for this review, it wasn't just some joke or cop-out so the video could be short. I realized that once you experience the combat, nothing else in the game matters. It's just simple button mashing, unless you have a gun, in which case you can mash fewer buttons. Find the key card, go to the right door, move on to the next level. Repeat for an hour and you'll realize that if you tried to trade this in to Gamestop and they offered you ten cents, then they were overpaying. Nothing in the game is good, it's simply beyond redemption. And once I realized that the game was just never going to be fun, I cut the rest of the script and summarized the rest of my points.
The invisible walls were absolutely horrendous. Whenver an enemy spawned, they formed invisible walls around them. I think this was intentional, kind of like a callback to 2D beat em ups where you had to beat all the enemies before the screen would move. The difference between those and
Hidden Invasion is that if you can see a whole level but your movement is restricted to just a few feet, that's incredibly unsatisfying. When you combine that with the maze-like level design and all of the locked doors, sometimes enemies would spawn behind locked doors, and trap you. That is when the game deserved some machete-ing.
There was even a boss introduction cutscene where one of the enemies was still onscreen, and he ran across the screen during the cutscene and just dragged my character along with him. That was just an awful feature, that resulted in so many bugs. And while we're talking cutscenes, somehow the actual game looks way better than the prerendered movies. The animations were so unnatural that when I started the game I actually thought the main characters were robot cops. Even inside the game the animations are janky. The running animation looks like the mocap work was done by an old lady at the gym. They even fire their guns with one arm, using the other arm to guard their face as they flinch. Yeah, I'm going with old lady in a mocap suit.
I didn't end up getting to it but my favorite part of the game was a door count challenge where you had to wait 2 minutes for an elevator to arrive so you can end the level. Somehow, I just stood by the elevator for the entire time and not one enemy came my way. If Toka was still making games, I'd recommend some QA testing, and I'd say that next time they should just try. They dont even have to try hard. Just give it an attempt, because this was pitiful.
