Space Invasion Slots
If you’re looking for a lightly themed game without much immersion and that pays homage to the classic conventions of slot machines, then Space Invasion is about to become your all-time favourite title. A cult classic, if you will. It has 3 reels of uber old school format, using graphics that look like the hugely popular Space Invaders.
When you look at how much love everyone seems to have for such a retro game, even those of us that weren’t born when it came out, it’s no wonder that other brands want in on a piece of the action. Space Invasion may blatantly grab some of the glory for itself, but thanks to the large jackpot of €10,000, not to mention a relatively low bet range, you won’t mind in the slightest.
Little pixelated aliens of doom are about to amass an assault on the grid you’re playing on, and so it’s now or never for you to make your move. You can win it all or lose the world.
Mounting an Attack
The battle for earth won’t begin until you’ve placed a bet, meaning if you’re playing for fun you’re always going to remain unscathed (lucky you). Eventually though, someone needs to step up to the plate and take ownership of this mess, and it might as well be you.
There are only seven buttons you have to interact with, with two of them setting the same aspect of the title; the plus and minus control the value of your bet, which apparently has no bearing on the final price you pay. This could be because we only ever played in the demo mode, so apologies if you introduce real cash to your experience and your bet sky rockets.
What we found was that our bet could be a small 3 coins or a large 9, neither of which are particularly bad amounts to deal with. Even should the value of each coin come into effect, players will still have a reasonable bet of €27, if we assume that the bet is worked out by the number of coins and the number of winlines.
Although you’re only playing with 3 lines to begin with, you can drop that figure down all the way to 1 and experience a more bracing fight, not to mention it’s exceedingly more retro to play a slot machine in this format.
Micro Aliens
These aliens may be tiny, but they bring a lot of booty with them, mainly in the form of cash, though one could be concealing a weapon. We just don’t know. The paytable has a lot of the same upon it, with the increase of cash coming with the increase of matching symbols, and so you haven’t got as much variety as you might first think.
What you do have is three different levels of payout, which corresponds with the three betting levels; if you only pay one coin per line, the most you can win is €3,000. Not quite 10k is it? Having to spend more on your stake will split opinions down the middle, as a lot of people don’t like such tactics to be employed by brands, an issue which The Art of Games may not have considered when designing the activity. Or maybe they did and just assumed that those who want the cash bad enough will bet by any means necessary…
In among the identical groupings are the ‘in any order’ combos, the ones where it doesn’t matter how the tiles fall as long as they meet a minimum requirement, such as having one orange and yellow alien and then a blue mask.
Low Scale Warfare
Everything about this online activity is quaint and humble, preferring to remain subtle in its actions. Taking that into account, the game should work for us and offer enough stimulation to keep us occupied, but it falls short.
The Art of Games produce so many different varieties of games, most of which we love, that we thought we’d leave satisfied, but instead we felt numb. Space Invasion just isn’t different enough – it could belong to any brand.
If you’re not bothered by individuality embedded in the gameplay then this will work out rather well for you, but we tend to prefer space-themed games that feel more exclusive.