Have You Played... Infested Planet

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Infested Planet is a top-down strategy game about warring spray hoses. Your enemies are Starship Troopers-style chitinous bugs who spawn in their hundreds from alien hives. Your own units are fragile marines and stationary turrets who spray bullets. Little by little you advance, destroying hives and capturing resource points until the aliens are driven back.

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Most strategy games follow a familiar arc, with a period of quiet growth before forces meet and battle lines are drawn. Infested Planet operates differently by putting you under constant pressure, meaning that the only moments of relative calm come when you've achieved a careful equilibrium with your enemy; ie. they keep pouring forward in an endless stream, but your machineguns are enough to keep them from gaining any new ground.

To win means turning back that tide, and a lot of the campaign's missions exist on a knife edge where small mistakes can mean being overwhelmed and crushed. That can be frustrating, but the satisfaction when you win is consequently massive. You'll research new tech between missions, gaining air strikes and new soldier classes and weaponry and so on, and you'll need all of it if you want to beat back the alien menace and, yeah, conquer their homeworld.

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