In the middle of last year, Taito released Space Invaders Extreme for the Nintendo DS and PSP in celebration of the franchise’s 30th anniversary. After the handheld versions experienced success at the critical and retail levels, Taito (in conjunction with Backbone Entertainment) has decided to bring it onto the Xbox Live Arcade platform with a few extra bells and whistles, a nice visual polish and a significantly lower price point. Like Pac-Man Championship Edition before it, Space Invaders Extreme is a textbook example on how to produce an excellent retro game revival.

At the most basic level, Space Invaders Extreme takes the formula from the original game, throws out the shields and adds in a combo system. Rather than simply blasting every invader you see and living to tell the tale, Space Invaders Extreme encourages players to shoot sets of coloured invaders which rewards you with a weapon like a powerful laser beam, bombs or wide shots for a limited time. While you earn these fancy weapons you need to keep killing stuff to keep your combo meter alive – the combos are the key to big scores.

Levels are structured much differently in Space Invaders Extreme; rather than each level being attached to a wave of invaders, levels consist of a constant flow of invader waves with a boss fight at the end. Invaders are not simply limited to dumb drones that move from left to right – there are new kinds of invaders that are packing shields and reflectors, some with variable movement patterns and others that can trigger chain reactions when they explode and take out nearby ships. The background UFOs play a more of a role on the field too, with different coloured units packing a unique ability, such as a massive laser cannon or invader reinforcements. Boss invaders are massive versions of regular invaders who can take a heck of a lot more punishment. One has to blast away at the outer shell of the bosses to reach their weak point, all the while dodging fire and nasty tactics from its cronies. Bonus rounds also get thrown into the mix to give players a chance to build up some extra points. Successful completion of a bonus round grants you a burst of Fever Time, where your ship’s firepower is dramatically increased, enabling you to rack up points like there’s no tomorrow.

Space Invaders Extreme is pretty easy to get into, but getting decent scores and ranks requires practice – this is one of those games where you need to learn level patterns before you can truly succeed. That makes it a bit of a hard sell for some gamers, but you really do get out what you put in. The game’s Achievement set is directed towards the more patient type of gamer, with some rewarding players for not missing a shot against a boss invader, or earning three S ranks.


Audio-visual presentation is a key component of the Space Invaders Extreme experience. The game embraces its simple low pixel heritage and slaps on a neon coating, following in the footsteps of other recent retro revivals like Pac-Man Championship Edition and Galaga Legions. The screen is thriving with activity, but never seems overly busy, nor does it ever buckle and the pressure and slow down. New to the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game are background visualisers, provided courtesy of Llamasoft’s Jeff Minter. Space Invaders Extreme’s music is fantastic, providing a basic techno-synth background track, with beats occurring every time you shoot an invader, not unlike Rez. The way the music pumps out really adds to the experience and helps to draw you further into the game.

Sadly, not all aspects of Space Invaders Extreme are worth celebrating. The new multiplayer modes implemented for the Xbox Live Arcade release are rather poorly implemented, suffering from extremely poor netcode which makes them really hard to enjoy. It is a real shame, because the multiplayer modes showed some promise. Cooperative play evens the odds up a little, but turns the action into sheer mayhem, making it very difficult to see what is going on, or build up effective combos. Versus modes come in the form of Score Attack and Survival, which are pretty self explanatory.

Space Invaders Extreme is a must-play game, but retro enthusiasts are the ones who are going to get the most out of it. As fantastic as the game is, its appeal is a little niche; you have got to enjoy playing levels over and learning patterns to boost your scores and ranks in order to get the most out of the game. It is a shame that Backbone and Taito could not produce better netcode for the online side of the game, but better visuals, awesome music and a low price tag make this the best version of Space Invaders Extreme by far.