An Alien Invasion That's Not Worth Fighting

Flat visuals and stupid aliens ruin TerraWars' interesting premise. (Ladyluck Digital Media)

The concept of the first-person shooter game TerraWars: NY Invasion is pretty cool. Aliens invade the city, and you must defend it at various well-known landmarks, including Battery Park and the Staten Island Ferry. Had this been 1998, TerraWars probably would be a bestseller. But this being 2006, NY Invasion is probably one of the ugliest and most flawed titles this year.

Graphically, there are freeware games that look better. There is almost no texture in the environments, which quickly negates the notion that you are in combat at famous locations. Everything looks flat and boring, and almost nothing is destructible. You can shoot up a generic wooden crate all day and it won't do anything. And worse, invisible walls in the nondescript landscapes keep you in the play area.

The aliens are also extremely stupid, to the point that you wonder how they mastered space travel to get to our planet in the first place. If you see a group of the odd, shark-looking creatures standing around, you can easily find a box or even a railing to crouch behind. Then you can lean out and pick them off at your leisure because even though it takes four or five shots to kill each one, none will react to your attack.

You play a National Guardsman. There are some attempts at advanced concepts, such as working with a squad of men, but your comrades are even more stupid than the aliens. I watched for several minutes once as my squad sat gazing down a street while an alien stood not 50 feet behind them, in the open, shooting at their backs.

The one saving grace of NY Invasion is that it requires very little hardware to run. A Pentium 3 processor running Windows 2000 can drive it just fine. So if you have an old game machine, you can play this title, but the experience will probably just convince you of the need to upgrade.

-- John Breeden II

TerraWars: NY Invasion Teen; Windows 2000/XP ($20) LadyLuck Digital Media