Everything wrong with Chicken Invaders Universe in few words or more
Finally we’re over the preface part and we can get to my main words of concern and how CIU is not going to be my friend.
You see CIU was something that I didn’t expect so soon. I thought that IA would first finish all of the editions because I even noticed a pattern that “Chicken Invaders X - X special editons” and it so far works. I saw the first teaser and was just happy because new game is better that different textures right? But then I learnt that it will be a MMO. So there was a first minus.
List of CIU sins so far (some of them are not yet here, but were talked about some time ago):
1. in-app purchases
It’s a big no no. Just no and no. Of course our loved keys also make a comeback, but here in most evil form. After release it was said that you will be able to buy keys for real money. But the store has mostly cosmetic items right? No, in this spin-off it actually has even more uses for keys that aren’t cosmetic - lives, satellites, special weapons, weapons, power levels, spaceships, spaceship upgrades. Power level alone can make it pay-to-win.
2. Use of existing bosses
Not so long ago CIU had only existing bosses that regular CI players knew about. There are 2 things that CIU makes wrong.
- It makes bosses less special. Before you only could fight final bosses at the final wave of a Chicken Invaders game. In CIU the same bosses can be fought at wave number 10.
- It makes older games bosses look lame. Look at Unidentified.Chicken.Objects, they feel great in CIU (I think that sometimes they go too low, but people don’t care about it) and if you go back to CI3 after killing U.C.O in CIU you will find that they are too easy and boring.
3. Using old music
This may be only wrong to me, because I personally associate a lot of things with music. Like really a lot of things. Events, failures, games, people. And here comes CIU using music from older games. It’s just like it crushes my memories which I can say are positive with every older part of the series. Using the same music for something different makes it also less special with original thing. It can still be solved by preparing new music specifically made for CIU. The worst thing about it are boss fight themes. Especially final boss themes. Final wave in older games was meant to be epic - after destroying 119 waves you have a difficult boss fight and epic music that pumps you to do your best. And this way you associated your hard work with music.
4. Waves
There’s a lot of waves in CIU. I think that it will be near 400 after release (that’s if we assume that CIU will get at least 100 waves from every Chicken Invaders Part. Now that creates a problem. Why would gamers pick older parts if in CIU there’s more variety and more content? Once again CIU makes older games look bad.
5. Main goal (or rather lack of it)
- If you’re a single player gamer (like me) there are no things that you can set as a goal here. There’s no purpose to play this game. You can only play it to break your record and it’s not so satisfying like in other mobile games. Let’s take a look at… idk, maybe “don’t touch the spikes” (I played it few years ago so I’m not sure it still works like that, but it was pretty basic so they should keep it). So in DTTS you control little bird using your fingers by tapping your screen. The game is endless so you can technically play forever, but obviously the difficulty changes based on how many points you have at the time. It’s not a big score like in Chicken Invaders. In fact it’s just 1 point for touching the wall. And trust me it makes breaking your record even by 1 feel special. Also it notifies you about it with special sound and a text “new record”. There are also in-app purchases here, but only used for cosmetic items like bird skins and you can earn it by playing the game. The more points you have the more game currency you can get if you catch the special “sweets”. Long story short, CIU doesn’t make breaking your record special. In fact if you beat the level you’re probably never return back to it because why would you want to return to something you won and breaking your record isn’t satisfying.
- Speaking of not satisfying. Exploration. CIU exploration reminds me of big open world games where you can’t do anything special, but “hey at least it’s bigger than other games!”. There are black-holes, but how can normal casual player know about their location or even that they exist? You can count for that player statistics, but the proper tutorial would be much better at this situation. Also exploring the whole galaxy to get rare items is not worth it because these stats hardly do anything that you need in gameplay. First versions of the game had interesting new mechanic about controling your spaceship, but due to outcry of some people it was totally scrapped and here we are with stats that don’t mean anything. The best thing about exploration is finding planet that have great missions which you aren’t annoyed of. Planets also have useless stats, chicken god knows what for. Maybe they could affect the gameplay? Temperature could change the speed at which our weapons overheat, mass could change control of our spaceship because it could be constantly pulled in the direction of the planet.
- Medals. Yeah, you can set your goal to earn all medals, but you can get them more than once. Maybe CIU should have achievements that you can only earn once in the profile and it would act as a way to check how much of the game you completed or how much you still need to do. Medals don’t feel like that for me.
- Maybe we can have some challenges in the game. Like to earn a new game difficulty skill you need to beat a specially made challenge with levels not picked as random. So you can earn all the difficulties for free and you can have something to set a goal (beating all challenges). Also the final challenge that needs to be made using the most difficult skill level should give some reward that you can use, maybe special spaceship?
6. Multiplayer?
Yeah, CIU is described as MMO. But does it deserve to be called multiplayer? We need online multiplayer or local multiplayer. You can only see other players spaceship in galaxy (sometimes even you get to see them flying from one planet to another) and challenges top 10. I know it’s difficult to add, but it needs to be added in such a game.
I can’t remember anything else that I wanted to add to this list, but I feel like it was bigger in my mind. So let’s get to the last part.