Cake Invaders is a Space Invaders clone that replaces forts with cakes and gives you a nice twist on getting your firepower upgraded. Sadly, its own short scope stops it from being a memorable game you’d return to constantly but its a nice diversion for an hour or two.
If you’ve not played a Space Invaders game before, the premise is simple. Alien craft descend from the top of the screen to attack your forts at the bottom. You’ll be shooting back trying to clear wave after wave of attacks to hang on as long as possible. In Cake Invaders its 5 German Baumkuchen cakes you need to defend and each one has three layers (lives) before they are eaten. When all 5 cakes are eaten – its game over. You can’t win Cake Invaders – you just want to survive as long as possible.
Shooting back is easy as holding down shoot and aiming a cursor on screen. Aliens come in packs and will go after whatever cake remains so if you’ve lost all the cake on the left hand side of the screen, those aliens matter less as they can’t hurt you much anymore. However, killing aliens builds up your power up meter and launches a power up onto the screen to shoot down. These may give you extra fire power or bullet speed, two other types of bullets with more strength or the excellent bonus attacker. You can have up to 5 shooters on your side and they’ll stand atop of the cakes and act as an extra life but also extra firepower. They’ll follow your cursor from their location and make the game a little easier due to their bullet spread. Of course, this means you’ll want to keep them safe which means killing all the aliens and upping your challenge a bit. It’s a nice balance of gameplay that keeps you on your toes.
That’s all there is though. You see most enemies within 5 minutes and nothing changes in the gameplay loop at all. Once you die, your score goes (eventually) onto the leaderboards and that’s your only real challenge if you want to chase it. Cake Invaders is so small in its scope, you’ll be bored after an hour and only want to dip in and out for an occasional round afterwards. It sorely lacks other modes, challenges or missions – hell a splitscreen or co-op mode would have been fantastic. Instead, its one mode that never grows with you.
As a result, fans of old coin-op styled games and easy platinum’s will get a quick kick out of the game but everyone else will wonder what the fuss is about. I wanted to like it more but it gets stale quickly and gives little back.
Review copy provided by publisher.
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