Face Invaders Review

Face Invaders is one of those games that you’ll play for five minute bursts. It has some charm thanks to its personalization features, plus its regular unlocks, but it’s a very simple game.

Starting out, you take a photo of something to form your face in game. It can be your actual face, of course, or you can wimp out and choose something else. Sadly, there’s no way of importing images in which would have made my vain attempts at snagging a photo of my guinea pig a lot easier, but it’s still a pretty good system.

You’re then thrown into an arena shooter of sorts and left to kill everything in your wake. Each enemy has to be dealt with in a different manner. For instance, the most basic of foes just need a quick tap, but soon you’ll be swiping or tapping multiple times at speed. When a flurry of different enemies come along, things get trickier too as you try to remember what works with which monster. Multi-touch goes some way to making this easier, especially if you recruit a friend to help out on the same screen. That’s the fun of Face Invaders though. It keeps things varied.

Adding to the reasons to keep playing are the many missions to complete. These tend to relate to surviving a certain length of time or achieving a kill streak, but they do a good job of giving you a focus. For extra motivation, they also unlock new power-ups which can prove very useful when up against the never ending hordes.

Face Invaders might keep it reasonably simple, but that works to its advantage. No in-app purchases clutter the field either which is really quite refreshing to see. Pay up $0.99 and you get everything that’s on offer.

While eventually the appeal of completing another mission is going to wane, it’s still the kind of game to dip into every now and then, especially if you want to entertain the kids with some colorful and cartoony style shooting.