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Robotech: Invasion (Xbox) Review
Where to begin with Robotech: Invasion. I went into playing the game with a very open and clear mind. I have only begun to experience the joys of the anime universe in the last few years, so I knew I wouldn’t know much about the series. It turns out that Robotech is a wildly popular anime franchise in Japan and even has a pretty big following here. This also isn’t the first time that Robotech had been translated into a video game. A few years back a Robotech title was released for the Xbox, GameCube and Playstation 2 that for the most part, captured everything that made the series so popular. If only I could say the same for Invasion. This latest Robotech title clearly had the potential to be an excellent game. I had been keeping track of its progress over the months and its screenshots were quite impressive. As with most games nowadays, screenshots mean nothing when it all comes down to it. Invasion is a victim of poor execution. The game has a great art style, soundtrack, and premise, but everything around it feels so incomplete. 
The game’s initial presentation leads you to believe it is a truly good game, but even from the beginning certain things just don’t add up. It opens during a scene from the past in which you are running from aliens. Yep, it’s that “out there”. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or why, and I know that with scenes of this nature, it should be left a mystery, but there was not one drop or clue that this opening scene had any significance on the larger scale. The opening scene aims to show off the action you can expect later on, and this is also where I got my first negative impression. Most of the time, I was either running or shooting a bunch of times at an enemy machine until it exploded (the same way each time, but we will get to that later), but mostly running. The scene ended with you being plopped into the present on a moving vehicle, supposedly being thrown in the line of duty. I was expecting some long story explanation that would at least give me some idea of what I was doing, I was quite wrong. The leader of that area basically gave me a mission and kicked me out into the world. I had never felt so lost in my life. I spent most of my first few minutes walking out into the expansive environment thinking of what I would do to the person who gave me these orders if he had been real. I’m not really going to get into any more of the story during the course of the review because for fans of the series, it could be a very important thing. “But wait, you didn’t even say much..”, yes in fact I did, since most of the story is told to you through cryptic blurbs and foggy mind trips, where there is story, you might want to find it for yourself.
To say that it plays like a typical first person shooter would be avoiding the truth a bit. It pretty much “IS” a typical first person shooter. You have a weapon, and on the missions that require it, you go around shooting down enemies. This wouldn’t be that bad if the physics engine made it interesting or if the story was more directly involved (like Halo or Half-Life), but no, it’s pretty much just there, and it’s your job to make what you can from it. Most of the time you will be on foot, but for certain missions (and to get around the large environments faster), you will end up using the cyclone suit which allows you to transform into a bike. Yes, a bike. What I didn’t say in the beginning of the review, was that you don’t play the aerial troops that most fans are acquainted with, but instead, ground cyclone troopers who do most of the behind the scenes dirty work. In theory, this would be an excellent idea to expand the lore of the series and provide new gameplay experiences, and to a degree it works quite well, but in the end, it comes off feeling generic. Overall the worst part would be the cyclone itself which controls more like a RC Car with a dying battery. You can only walk backwards to reverse which is extremely tedious in high risk situations and every single time you hit some sort of high or low on the ground, the speed dies out and you begin to accelerate again. The stop start nature of the driving made me walk most of the time.
 
Most missions involve escorting people, reaching certain areas, or just plain wiping out the enemy. The flow of the missions though is pretty awkward. Most of these situations just blend together minute after minute. In one ten minute period of play, you will go from exploring an unnamed enemy base, to getting through a madman’s abandoned city, to trying to find a way back to the surface from a large bridge that just conveniently collapsed while you were crossing it. Once again, if the story had been intertwined properly, this may not have been such a big issue. Weapon variety is limited, but the energy rifle did get me through most of the tough spots. Enemy AI is appaling, and im not going to dwell much on it because I will simply give you a visual. Basically, it’s like you just killed some guy’s girlfriend and he are just walking at you with absolutely no conscience guiding him, and he will walk at you until he is stopped (in this case with an energy rifle). Sometimes an enemy will strafe or dodge, but half of the time, this is even before you begin shooting.
Regarding the gameplay on a whole though, it can take an average gamer around ten hours to complete, and believe me, it’s not as bad as my first comments suggest. It is a competent shooter that had some really good ideas behind it, but it simply never meshed. One of my most memorable moments in the game (I actually do have a few) was during the first on rails mission, which presented the tension in the universe a little bit better than the on foot action. Fans of the series will love it no matter what and good for them, because the Robotech series on a whole is an excellent franchise, and the attempt made by the developers is admirable.
To be brief regarding the visuals and sound, they both were basically unused potential. The voice acting for the most part never fit the situation and the characters always sound upbeat even when the world around them is being destroyed by the alien Invid. The sound effects were pretty weak with the only notable exception being the weapon sounds, which proved to be quite good, and much better than the constant “ugh” and “ahh” heard from the enemies. Visually, the game looks excellent in some parts, and bland in others. Regardless, the environments are always expansive and interesting to look at, but overall they are pretty lifeless. Buildings are almost always there for show (the enemies sometimes spawn from random houses) and very rarely can you interact with anything. The havoc physics engine was used in Invasion, for barrels. Yes, for barrels, when they explode of course. It’s a cool effect, but pretty worthless since the barrels disintegrate before they hit the ground and bounce two times. Textures looked excellent in early screenshots and hold up well in the final game, but some of them become very ugly when you get to a closer proximity, and it probably had something to do with the game’s optimization process. The enemy and character models were also pretty good, but since none of the characters move their mouth’s when they speak, any bit of believability just disappears.
It’s simply impossible to end on a bad note because Robotech: Invasion was a worthy try at showing fans a different side of the Robotech universe. Traces of many neat ideas can be found within the game, all of them never reached their full potential, making Invasion a pretty standard first person shooter. For fans of the series and Xbox Live players (it has an excellent online aspect which helps to redeem the game quite a bit, that is if players continue to pick it up) Invasion is a good game to invest in, even if for just a rental. In the end though, people who have never played or watched Robotech before, should probably just make this a rental, if anything at all.
 
Written by Joseph Bennett. Posted year 2004.
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Released on
October 5, 2004
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