There's a small story hidden somewhere in this rambling mess, certainly written by an elementary school student who won some sort of contest, involving aliens and their ability to replace humans. The two main heroes, Dean Travis and Karen Bride, concocted by someone with not much spare time and certainly a lot less artistic abilities, both trundle along, not acting, or reacting, or even give the situations any real thought. Supposedly, there's some control and strength differences between the two but any that exists are too negligible to become noticeable. In fact, they're so bland and interchangeable that they both have the exact same personalities, both act the exact same way in every cuts scene, and read from the exact, plot-hole ridden, grammatically incorrect script (be prepared to see some fine usage of the English language when they speak in past, present, and future tense all in the same sentence). Some of the events also fail to make a modicum of sense, skyrocketing well beyond the plane of mortal reason and comprehension, including getting into the White House via a common manhole and sewer, and talk about carrying a 30-foot nuclear warhead on your shoulder.

Gameplay consists of jogging your character through whatever boring locale the game puts you in next, without a thought in those pretty little heads of theirs, punching people (or kicking, it doesn't really matter), picking up their weapons and then shooting them. Your usual cookie-cutter objectives are present: find the keycards, disarm the bombs, escape the building, and so on. It's all a very cumbersome affair that bores me even now to think about it, nearly impossible to effectively write about it. Though to be honest, if you were to strip away this rotting, mephitic skin and place your hands in the very core of Hidden Invasion, there is actually a good bit of merit, though I suppose the same can be said about virtually every game ever released.

And now for the nitty-gritty of the negative aspects of the game (you may not have realized it, but I have no more positive comments about Invasio). I should've noticed something was terribly askew when we (mercifully, I played this with a friend) were running to the end of the level when my friend yells, "Help! I'm stuck in a bench!" Since the game doesn't allow you to split up, the character not moving is pushed along by an invisible hand in the same direction as the moving character. Fortunately for us, his character was pushed right into a giant glitch, finding himself knee-deep in subway bench. We were able to get out after about five minutes of jumping but something like this is pretty much inexcusable.

The game seems to have a personal vendetta against the player, and wishes to punish all that were stupid enough to try this game out. The arrow (which is there for about half of the game) should, in theory, point the player to the next pertinent goal. But alas, it instead exists only to lead people where they don't want to go or where to go if they want to get lost and/or die. Perhaps this is due in part to the wildly erratic and fidgety camera, which is more akin to one of those virtual reality rides they have at amusement parks designed to make you nauseous and throw you against a wall, than an actual camera. In turn, the poor camera is also in part to faulty pressures and triggers (those undetectable areas that tell the camera to move in or change position) which sometimes work, sometimes don't. Don't be surprised to run towards the horizon, growing smaller and smaller, like the end of a Charlie Chaplin film, only to realize that the camera should've zoomed in but didn't. And then don't try to be too frustrated when you walk back and forth, trying to trigger the event like a hapless citizen who's retracing his steps to find where he lost his keys.

Not only is the game frustrating and boring, it's also very, very short, beatable within a few hours, if you can keep your interest up long enough for even that. More fun is to be had with discovering the numerous, prevalent glitches, my absolute favorite glitch being the falling death cycle. You see, if any of your characters walk behind a big pole or something view obstructing, a countdown will begin and after four seconds, the obscured character will be placed back to where the other character is. Now, when playing two players, if one of the characters falls to his doom, the other character will be pulled along with him (the previous rubber band rule where the game attempts to keep both characters on screen at all times). Naturally, the character that fell and lost a life will be warped back to within the vicinity of the other character. But if the other character was pulled, that means he's also in the process of falling. So unfortunately, the original character that fell is warped to where the character that is falling and when that character is finished dying, he'll be warped back to where the other character is in the process of falling. Meaning that you're both in trapped in a cycle of screaming, falling, losing a life until the game ends. Amusing for those who wanted to see it; grounds for a disc snapping for those who didn't. And don't think that this can't happen in the single player mode. For some reason, when you're warped back up after your fall, you'll start sliding over to the edge where you'll then tip over and die forevermore.

The people listed in the "Special Thanks" section of the game credits are obviously people who agreed not to report the developers to the proper authorities. Toka seems to have no semblance of perception of logic or attached any reality to their products; they don't deserve to continue making video games and have absolutely nothing worthy to say in this industry. This is a sad and unimportant game, one whose future is equally inconsequential.

· · · Sqoon