The Digest: Share your hatred for the planet Earth and the entire human race in this simplistic arcade game. Dodging bullets, dropping cows, and abducting cheerleaders is definitely some entertainment.

THE FACT SHEET

RELEASE DATE: April 18th, 2010
DEVELOPER: Fun Infused Games
Price: 80 Points
GENRE: Action/Adventure

PRODUCT OVERVIEW:

As a UFO pilot in training, you have been tasked with the overwhelming mission of invading Earth, terrorizing the locals, and returning home in one piece. Use your tractor beam to abduct helpless Earthlings and defeat aggressive foes. It will take all your skills, wits, and intellect to prove your alien worth and triumph over humanity.

PRODUCT FEATURES:

• Simple Gameplay
• Humorous moments
• In Game Achievements

At some point in everyone’s life, they dream about becoming an alien. Abducting people, cows, and flying a UFO was just fascinating. Well, Fun Infused Games wanted to make those dreams come true with Abduction Action. This indie game has you play as a young alien who’s sister gets married to a high ranking military officer. Your new brother-in-law does you a favor and enlists you in UFO training which is where your story begins.

The story in this game is actually not a bad read and is even a bit funny at parts. It won’t have you rolling on the floor from laughter, but you may catch yourself in a brief chuckle. The story makes sense and does a great job explaining why you’re on Earth completing these various objectives. The game is extremely simple and you figure out the controls before they teach you. One button uses the tractor beam, another uses turbo, and one will send out concussion bombs. It’s the kind of simple gameplay that will not have potential gamers stray away from.

The game is simple to play, but the level of difficulty is almost too simple. You’ll be blasting through the objectives fairly quickly and the variety of these objectives do not differ from each other too much. Abduct 10 cheerleaders, kill ten cops or soldiers, abduct 5 cows, drop 5 crates on civilians, drop a crate at a higher distance on a civilian, etc… Each level has a set amount of objectives to complete before the level is completed, all ending in a very simple boss fight.

When the game does attempt to bump up the difficulty, it’s more annoying then difficult because enemies start to just constantly shoot you. Your ship does not have any weapons; all you can do is use turbo through light enemy fire. If you try and hold an object while using turbo, it falls. If you get hit too often while holding an object, the object falls.

It’s not necessarily harder, but picking the same object up several times because 8 people are shooting at you from all directions, does become a tad tedious. And the only way to defeat bosses, is by dropping objects on them, and a lot of the time, you wish you can have some sort of weapon to fight with. You can block bullets with boxes, but when you find that out, the game is almost over and it’s hardly used.

Also, this game is excruciatingly short. The game only has 5 levels. When it ends you don’t expect it to, and you’re left feeling somewhat robbed at how fast you completed it. There are some in game achievements, which is nice, but those aren’t very hard either. There is even a score attack mode that records what you get on the games leaderboard. That mode however, is really dull and will not hold your attention for very long. If this game had some sort of multiplayer aspect, possibly two spaceships fighting over who can abduct the most cows or pick up and drop off a certain amount of civilians in a drop ship before time runs out. Something like that could really boost the games replay-ability.

Conclusion: With all that said, Abduction Action is not a bad game. It’s just missing that “X factor” to make us come back and play it again. It’s a simple game to play through when bored or waiting for friends to get online, but it’s the kind of game that will be played once, beaten, and not picked up again.

Single Player: 3/5

Special thanks to Fun Infused Games for providing us with a copy of the game for review.