Sci-fi shooter “Inversion” belongs to what I call “the aggrieved-dad genre.” You portray a cop. Your wife has been killed by invading aliens. And you’re daughter is missing. So you go on a mad quest to find your girl and shoot aliens.
Sci-fi shooter “Inversion” belongs to what I call “the aggrieved-dad genre.” You portray a cop. Your wife has been killed by invading aliens. And you’re daughter is missing. So you go on a mad quest to find your girl and shoot aliens.
Sound familiar? In “God Of War,” you went on a kill-crazy rampage against Zeus’ army after the deaths of your wife and daughter.
In the original “Max Payne,” you went on a kill-crazy rampage against crooks and politicians after the deaths of your wife and daughter.
Movies have also exploited this aggrieved-dad field of vigilantism, most classically with Chuck Bronson’s “Death Wish” and Mel Gibson’s “Mad Max.”
In “Inversion,” you are the distraught and angry cop Davis Russell. You and your cop buddy Leo are captured. You then must break out of the aliens’ prison labor concentration camp, and go on an alien-killing streak of some magnitude.
“Inversion” feels a bit inspired by the alien-killing “Gears of Wars.” It’s a third-person cover shooter, and when you run across city streets, the camera angle goes all wiggly-woggly, similar to “Gears.”
But here, the gaming process also involves anti-gravity. Humanoid aliens have created 90-degree gravity twists on Earth.
So one minute, you are running across a street-battlefield. The next, gravity changes, so you are running across a building wall, or across a battlefield-ceiling.
That’s cool. I also enjoy the telekinetic-type gravity guns I steal from aliens. These guns let me move giant objects (cars and such) in an up-down motion, and to hold objects as shields, and to throw objects as weapons.
In fact, there is much to like about “Inversion.” There’s a deeper-than-expected storyline, featuring cinema scenes, propelling characters and story arcs.
And the game is correctly paced. At first, you can only shoot a rifle; then a shotgun and a sniper rifle; then you acquire a gravity weapon; then another; and so on.
In other words, just as I begin to think the game is bogging down, it gives me a new weapon or setting to tweak my brain.
Unfortunately, “Inversion” just doesn’t have enough money behind its development. Thus, it lacks visual extravagance and a more elegant shooting experience.
On the one hand, I think of “Inversion” as a good bargain game, or as a fairly decent “B-film”-type action-shooter.
However, it’s not priced at a bargain level, so how do I recommend a $60 purchase of this instead of, say, “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier?”
Well, I really dig the online multiplayer. But on the day the game launched, I found only a handful of online gamers to play (not even enough for team deathmatch).
Bottom line: Buy “Inversion” cheap if you can, or rent it, if you want a workaday, slightly above-average shooter featuring a novel anti-gravity idea, plus online multiplayer and cooperative modes.
Or buy it if you’re into daddy-daughter vengeance themes. It’s got that premise by the exploding barrel.
“Inversion” by Namco Bandai retails for $60 for PS 3 and Xbox 360 — Plays slightly above-average. Looks poor. Easy to moderately challenging. Rated “M” for blood, gore, intense violence, strong language, suggestive themes. Two and one-half out of four stars.
Doug Elfman is an award-winning entertainment columnist who lives in Las Vegas. He blogs at http://www.lvrj.com/columnists/Doug_Elfman.html. Twitter at VegasAnonymous.