Humanity really needs to learn to hedge its bets. It seems like every time an alien menace decides to attack, we’re always stuck with one last, best hope; why didn’t we put together a few of those beforehand? A little forethought would go a long way, human race! Otherwise you’re going to end up trying to hold off an invasion force of biomechanical monsters with a ship instead of a fleet, as we see in Codex Worlds’ Infinium Strike.
This is, at its core, a tower defense game. You might remember these from the late 2000s or so when the indie and casual game sectors were absolutely saturated with them. You’ve got a point to defend and you’ll need to do it using stationary defenses, or towers; in this case the point is the Freedom Strike, a battlecarrier wielding weaponry based on the powerful element Infinium, and you’ll be defending it from the Wrog, who are essentially the Borg. Your towers are turrets placed on various hardpoints on the ship, with the Freedom Strike reverting at the end of each stage to allow you to reconfigure your defenses.
As for how it plays, well…it’s a tower defense game! Victory is all about efficient placement of turrets to maximize coverage and damage. The most sizable part of the game is spent figuring out what turret to place where and when to upgrade it to get the most bang for your buck. Turrets tend to prefer certain ranges and certain enemies so you can get a lot of work out of matching the right turret to the right foe. You’ve also got defense drones and special Supertech abilities to use that can help you get out of hot water, so there’s a little more depth than your average Flash game from 2008.
Infinium Strike certainly looks and sounds good. If you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you can make a really pretty wheel instead, I suppose, and that’s what’s happened here. The Freedom Strike and the Wrog are both cool enough, and having to use the camera to move around the Strike to keep an eye on every angle of attack is a nice touch. The game isn’t especially long, but at the same time it doesn’t overstay its welcome so it’s hard to complain.
Tower defense games aren’t quite as common in this day and age, with indie devs having largely moved on to the much-easier-to-produce walking simulator, so it’s nice to see a sterling example of the genre in 2016. If you loved games like Defense Grid, you could certainly do worse than Infinium Strike.
