Arcades have always sought after your quarters, providing money-making machines that asked for more if you wanted to continue. Of course, they never made these games very easy. That wouldn’t have been a good business decision. It became many people’s pastime to go to the arcade and enjoy a good time. Some of the old classics were Galaga and Space Invaders, which pitted players against alien invasions. Zeroptian Invasion takes these ideas and… well, takes them. As you progress, enemies will change to a different color as you defeat the bosses. This gives a little bit more life to the waves of enemies, specifically the bosses. As far as casual goes, this game nails it.

Here’s what I liked:

Like it was made in the 1970s — It’s a blast from the past. Everything about it is straight from the original games that inspired. The music and sound effects are good but so very bland, which actually matches the boring graphics. The goal wasn’t to create something entirely new and amazing, but instead to let people relive old memories of the classic arcade days. Nostalgia, as much as I hate that word, is bleeding from the screen when you play.

No Quarters Needed — If your ship gets vanquished, you can simply continue. You may have to start the set of levels over again, but you will not have to start from scratch. Your score gets stripped but for a lot of people that won’t matter. People like to finish a game and if you had to start over after getting far, you would probably just quit. Also, I would like to mention to achievement hunters that this is an extremely short and easy game to complete. You can be done with it in as little as ten minutes or less.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Extra Options — There is no extra anything. You get what you get. Well, there is one option to turn the screen around making it more difficult but resembling that of a tabletop arcade game. I don’t know if I count that. The best time I’ve had with an older game was Pac-Man Championship Edition. It took its old school blueprints and added beautiful special effects and more current fast-paced sounding music. I appreciated it because it used its base idea and showed how it could mature to still be relevant. Meanwhile, in Zeroptian Invasion, there is nothing that was added to this specific genre. Not one extra cool option is setting it apart from Galaga or Space Invasion. In fact, those games have their own new editions that implement the features I would have liked to see.

Well that was fast — You can pretty much get everything out of the game within 15 minutes. Besides new bosses and color-changing enemies, there is absolutely no redeeming value in finishing the fight. Unless you’re a die-hard fan of this genre, you’ll likely be quitting pretty quickly. There are several other games that give you more entertainment through mini games. There really isn’t> much to say about Zeroptian because there is hardly any content within it.

Wrap-up

While it’s nice to live back in the day, nothing is new enough to want to play Zeroptian Invasion for more than a few rounds. If people have a craving to play those older arcade classics, they can simply play them. There aren’t any actual problems. Everything works and plays just fine. It just isn’t very fun. Nothing new is present, just recycled ideas. It’s like an old classic car that wasn’t restored. Though in this case, it was never actually a classic. It’s a new car bearing a resemblance to a classic.

Score: No Appeal

Zeroptian Invasion was published by Ratalaika Games S.L. and developed by Josyanf1 on Xbox One. It was released on April 24, 2019, for $4.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.