Campus Invaders
Silliness! Yaay!
Self-referential IF silliness…'mkaay…
Severely underimplemented self-referential IF silliness… well…
When Campus Invaders plonked me down in the middle of a “my crappy school/alien invasion”-hybrid, I went all giddy with expectations. Oh the possibilities… That’s one big opportunity to juggle and mix-n-match some tropes into a hilarious IF pot-pourri.
My enthousiasm swiftly waned…
There are many typos (slips of the finger adding à, é or even û at the end of a word). The game switched from present to past tense in a location. I could not descend the stairs with a trolley, I had to use the elevator. However, a “sturdy ladder” posed no problem…. The horrified school rector is looking out of his office window at the swarming aliens outside. X ALIENS; “You can’t see any such thing”. A great opportunity for a wider view of the game world got burned: On the terrace: X SPACESHIP; “You can’t see any such thing.” Granted, I got a line of text about the ship after X LIGHTS, but come on…
And the fricking laser-armed alien robot should kill you after two turns. Same goes for the hideous alien in the bathroom. Add some spice!
Spring Thing and ParserComp are coming up in a good six months. If only the author had mustered some more patience…
Mind you, I absolutely love the setup of this game. So many opportunities. If this were expanded and polished and implemented more deeply, I would happily embrace all the silliness it could throw at me, nevermind what Monty Python’s captain has to say.
But in this state? No.