Summary
Stupid are not the invaders, stupid is this game!
The Good
Videos are cool, and some animations are well-made and funny. The character design is very good, the aliens look all different and each one with its (his?) own personality.
The Bad
"Stupid Invaders" tries to continue the tradition of the classic puzzle-solving comedy adventure. It fails for many reasons. It is obvious the main inspiration here was LucasArts' classic
Day of the Tentacle. There are many parallels in gameplay, overall atmosphere and the style of the puzzles. The only difference is that while "Day of the Tentacle" was original, inspiring, and downright funny, "Stupid Invaders" is neither. Beside the fact you play as aliens here, there is hardly an original feature in the entire game. Even graphically it is conservative: the graphics are sharp and vibrant, but those are still the old 2D "comic" graphics, that look almost exactly the same as in older LucasArts' comedy adventures. The story, that was so cool in "Day of the Tentacle", is trivial and uninspired in this game. The puzzles are extremely old-fashioned, there is not even one really creative puzzle in the whole game. Just the same old inventory-based stuff. But the most disturbing, and even disgusting feature of "Stupid Invaders" is its so-called "humor". Many comedy adventures become great games mostly because of the humor they deliver, regardless the fact they might have shallow gameplay, silly story, or overly illogical puzzles. "Stupid Invaders" feature the most corny, banal, and really stupid adolescent "toilet" humor. There is not even one really good joke in this game. Some might say games like the
Leisure Suit Larry also had enough of this stuff, but don't forget they had many genuinely funny situations and, most of all, jokes. Leisure Suit Larry was really funny; "Stupid Invaders" can be funny only to those people who laugh every time they hear a loud noise coming from a toilet, or see a person glitching on a banana shell, falling down and breaking his or her leg. Even
Simon the Sorcerer II had a more intelligent kind of humor.
The Bottom Line
"Stupid Invaders" is a sad testament of the degradation of my beloved genre. Not only it is not original - it takes, in fact, all that was corny, annoying, or plainly stupid in the great adventures of the past, and delivers us a tasteless mixture of uninspired gameplay, stupid story, bad humor, and puzzles from the stone age. The game's only saving grace is its good design (especially of the characters). If you care for adventures, don't buy this game.
