Infected E3 2005 Hands-On

The Los Angeles Convention Center is crawling with zombies during E3 2005, and not all of them are sleep-deprived journalists. Majesco hired actors to dress up in full undead makeup and shuffle around promoting Infected, the upcoming multiplayer shooter from Planet Moon Studios. We got some hands-on time with Infected at the Majesco booth, and it looks like it's shaping up to be a unique and exiting experience.

Infected is a third-person shooter for the PlayStation Portable, and in it you play as a police officer in New York at a time when a mysterious virus has broken out that's turning people into zombies. You're immune to the virus though, and in fact some scientists discover that your blood is lethal to the virus, causing a violent reaction when it comes in contact with anyone who has been infected. As a result, you are given a special viral gun that attaches to your arm and fires small capsules of your blood. You'll also have other weapons such as a shotgun and a bazooka. You can't kill the infected creatures with your ballistic weapon alone though; you'll have to weaken them until the targeting reticle turns red, at which point you can shoot the zombies with your viral gun to make them explode. These explosions cause damage to any other creatures nearby, so you can get combo bonuses by weakening several enemies and then blowing them up to cause a chain reaction. You can also score aerial combos by using the bazooka to blow enemies into the air and then finishing them with the viral gun. Naturally, bigger combos result in more points and health pickups.

We only got to play the multiplayer game, but according to Majesco the final game will have a complete single-player campaign as well as special challenge stages. We played one of the multiplayer stages designed to imitate New York. The environment was fairly large, with buildings, burning cars, and plenty of enemies, most of which are non-player characters like the basic zombies, but there are human characters strolling around the environment as well. Eventually you'll see them get attacked by the infected, which will make the innocents turn into zombies as well. You can purify innocents by running through them as they're becoming infected, which will get you bonus points. In addition to the basic enemies and the uninfected pedestrians, you'll see other players indicated by a green triangle over their heads. You can defeat other players the same way you defeat other enemies, although they're tougher and hopefully a bit smarter than the average zombie.

The truly unique feature of the game is that when you beat a player in multiplayer mode, you will "infect" that player's PSP, which puts your own custom skin on all the enemies in the single-player campaign of the player you defeated. That player then must complete certain objectives to restore the game. In addition to being able to upload your custom skin on another person's PSP, you'll also be rewarded with virus points based on how many people you've infected and how many people those people have infected since. You can use these points to purchase weapon upgrades and other bonuses, which are downloaded when you connect to the Infected server. Since you get more points for defeating higher-ranked players, you're given incentive to challenge people at your same skill level rather than picking on newcomers.

The game controls fairly well given the layout of the PSP. You move with the analog stick, strafe with the R button, perform a quick turnaround with the L button, and fire your two weapons with the face buttons. There is an automatic lock-on when you get an enemy in your sights, so you don't have to be entirely accurate to do well, but you do need to be able to keep enemies in front of you, which can get tricky when multiple enemies attack from different directions.

Overall, the game seems to be coming along nicely, and it's encouraging to see Planet Moon Studios making good use of the wireless Internet connection of the PSP. We'll bring you more details about Infected before its release later this year.