Not "everything" needs to be Bloodier and Gorier, Taito!
Never knew the Taito arcade classic, Space Invaders, needs a Bloodier and Gorier 3-D spin-off, right? Now you do!
Space Raiders (alternatively known as Space Invaders: Invasion Day) is a spin-off of Space Invaders released for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, where the action in outer space from the classic games made its way to earth itself.
Depicting a scenario where the aliens' invasion force do make it to earth, hordes and hordes of alien pods, released from their spaceships, crashes into an unspecified city somewhere in the United States. And from the pods, the aliens' army, consisting of giant insectoid mutants, plant-creatures, sentient blobs and heavily armed alien foot soldiers begins laying waste on humanity, slaughtering much of the populace.
Amidst the chaos, three unlikely survivors - a teenager named Justin, a fashion model named Ashley and a military sergeant named Naji who's the last surviving member of his squad - takes up arms and fights back.
Gameplay-wise, instead of piloting a ship like the arcade original, you're fighting the aliens on foot, from the ruins of the cities to the subways and hangars of an air field before infiltrating the mothership. Most of the action is depicted from a behind-the-back perspective (similar to old-school Run-and-Gun games), though instead of running forward, you're only allowed to run horizontally left and right while shooting at the alien horde.
The game was a flop that didn't do the franchise any favors, with subsequent entries of Space Invaders returning to the classic space-shooter format.
Not to be confused with a 1983 film by Roger Corman.
"You leave me no choice!"
- Alien Blood: The alien enemies bleeds in a wide variety of colours, green being the most frequent. The possessed human corpses, in fact, bleeds purple after they're assimilated by alien spores to emphasize how they're no longer human.
- Aliens Are Bastards: The invading force are initially assumed to be wild alien creatures, attacking earth in search for a home and to reproduce. But then you made it into the alien mothership and confront the core, and surprise surprise, It Can Think. And then it explains its motivations for invading our world:Alien Core: I hate your voice. I hate your looks. I hate your heart. You are nothing to me.
- Arm Cannon: The slightly more humanoid alien grunts have laser cannons grafted to their right arms.
- Big Bad: The Alien core who controls the invasion forces also serves as the game's difficult Final Boss, though the ending subverts this by revealing the core to be the first of multiple invading waves.
- Blob Monster: One of the many alien monster enemies introduced halfway into the game, resembling a red, fleshy, jelly-like blob with a single eye as its head, and can spit small acidic globs as a ranged attack. Shoot the eye enough and the monster dissolves into a puddle. The subway's boss is in fact a King Mook blob monster that takes up the entire background.
- Bolivian Army Ending: Your player(s) destroyed the aliens' core and stopped the invasion, as all aliens remaining on earth dies out. Yay!... except it turns out, all those enemies you fought throughout the game? Only an early invasion wave. The game ends with a haunting final shot of a massive second alien armada heading towards earth. The End.
- Boss Rush: The alien core will summon clones of the first four bosses, which you'll need to fight in sequence one at a time before you face the core.
- Bug War: Unlike the original games where the alien invaders are depicted in cuddly, 8-bit form, here we get a full glimpse of the aliens in the flesh, where they're gigantic insectoid creatures who bleeds gunk when shot to bits.
- Came from the Sky: Where the aliens are from, with the game's opening cinematics depicting hundreds and hundreds of alien pods suddenly dopping from the stratosphere into the city, destroying most of the buildings and killing a large chunk of its population. Then, alien bugs starts hatching from those eggs and swarms over the survivors.
- Darker and Edgier: Raiders depicts the original games' invasion from a human perspective and allowed players to see the devastation and violence first hand through the perspective of three playable characters that had each lost people in the invasion.
- Dying Curse: From the alien core and Final Boss, as it succumbs away. And it's not joking either:Alien Core: Every last one of you WILL be eradicated!
[cut to a shot of a massive alien armada in space heading towards earth] - Elevator Action Sequence: Reaching the mothership's core requires you to ride an elevator platform, where alien mooks on adjacent elevators will attack you when you're on their elevation. It's possible to find a target on the neighboring elevator however, and blow it up causing all the alien enemies (except flying ones of course) to fall to their deaths.
- Fragile Flyer: Winged alien insectoid monsters serving as Airborne Mooks are smaller and faster than regular alien enemies who moves around on foot, and capable of swooping near your players for close-range attacks, but they die in a single shot using any weapon.
- Giant Crab: The boss of the hangar stage is an alien crab behemoth, who rips open the hangar's back wall once you killed all the mooks to stomp its pincers on you.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Possessed human corpses animated by the aliens tends to have their uppers messily exploding once you shot them enough, leaving behind a pair of legs with nothing above the waist. But alas, somehow they can continue walking around and attacking until you put a few more bullets in them.
- Hypocrite: The alien's core, located in the heart of the invaders' spaceship, will call you out for you invading its ship, despite being the leader of an invasion force that leaves much of earth in ruins.Core: What do you want, invader?
Player Character: Invader? You are the invader! - Invisible Monsters: There's an alien bug enemy whose wings opens up like petals, and are visible when flying. When it folds its wings however, it becomes invisible, though it will reveal itself automatically in order to attack you.
- Killer Gorilla: The first boss is an alien reptilian gorilla monster, who spends the while fight leaping all over the place. Every now and then it will attempt using its Power Fist (both of them) to squash you via Ground Pound.
- King Mook:
- The subway level have an XXL-sized version of the regular Blob Monster enemies serving as its boss.
- Prior to fighting the alien core, you need to fight two King-sized versions of the aliens' humanoid foot soldiers (those creatures with a cannon on their shoulder) serving as a Dual Boss.
- Man-Eating Plant: Besides giant bugs and possessed humans, the aliens' invasion force somehow also includes sentient, moving plant-monsters modeled after the Venus flytrap, which attacks by chomping on you up close. There's also a Foul Flower variety with petals for heads capable of shooting spores.
- Moveset Clone: All three playable characters, Justin, Naji and Ashley, plays out exactly the same, with the only differences being cosmetic appearances.
- Mythology Gag: There's a harmless alien probe enemy considerably smaller than other regular alien foes, who occasionally flies across the area and if shot, drops a power-up item. A reference towards the "mystery ship" from Invaders, the parent franchise.
- Oddball in the Series: The only entry in the Space Invaders franchise where your characters are on foot, dropping the spacehip-shooter format (ironic considering the original game is a Trope Maker and template for hundreds of similar spaceship games).
- Possessing a Dead Body: The smaller alien bugs have this ability. After the first stage, you look upon the carnage of the corpse-infested city, only for the nearest corpse to suddenly get up... with an alien bug attached to its neck. Cue the second level which started introducing alien-possessed humans.
- R-Rated Opening: The game's opening cinematics depicts the invasion force actually making their way into the city and devouring everyone, with civilians getting crushed by collapsing buildings, chomped by alien insects, and plenty of dead bodies in the aftermath with the police and military barely holding the aliens back, eventually succeeding while suffering massive casualties. There's even a shot of a graveyard filled with the tombs of all those who perished during the first attack, before news arrive of a second, larger wave of aliens incoming. And then the game begins in proper.
- Scenery Gorn: Each and every single stage in the city, with rubble all over the pavement, buildings on the verge of collapsing, and vehicles either overturned or burning up. And crawling with alien creatures for good measure.
- Shoulder Cannon: One of the more humanoid alien freaks have a turret extending from its right shoulder.
- Shout-Out: The opening cinematics depicting the mountain-sized alien mothership looming over the city, casting a shadow as civilians looked upwards in awe, is a rather blatant nod to Independence Day. Appropriate since the latter film is likely inspired by the original Space Invaders game.
- Shower Scene: Ashley, one of the three playable characters, is depicted taking her shower in the opening cinematics, after barely surviving the invasion.
- Sinister Subway: The third stage, where most of the subway have collapsed in the invasion's aftermath and is infested with assorted alien enemies.
- Sole Survivor: Naji, one of the three playable characters, is the only surviving member of his squad during the aliens' first assault, where in the opening cinematics he saw his team getting massacred before deciding to blow up himself with the rest of the aliens via grenade in a Taking You with Me moment... only to miraculously survive. The subsequent scene have Naji paying a Due to the Dead to his deceased comrades in a cemetery before news of a second incoming wave arrives.
- Spike Shooter: The alien gorilla boss have spikes on its back, which it can shoot as ranged projectiles. It does exactly that right in its introductory cutscene.
- Those Were Only Their Scouts: The hundreds and hundreds of aliens you literally spend the whole game killing turns out to be a fraction of a much larger invasion force, as the end credits reveals.
- Tractor Beam: The alien invaders will repeatedly use pillars of light to drop their units into the city. Repeatedly.
