Gamermall.com rating: NR

Don't do that with Space Invaders Extreme.

We're going to do our best here to capture what this game is all about (see: awesome). If Space Invaders, Lumines and Pac-Man: Championship Edition had a videogame orgy, this game would be the offspring.

At first glance, Extreme probably looks like the traditional Space Invaders rehash with some new backgrounds and flashy sidebars. It is, but it's so much more. You'll pilot the familiar ship left and right across the screen as you blow up hordes of aliens and ships that are moving all about, but these aliens will grow in size, use shields and fire at angles. Oh, the villains can also pull a Paper Mario and turn sideways to become super-skinny.

Beyond the kick in the pants for multicolored enemies, there's a radical change in presentation for the franchise. The backgrounds change as you go, there are combos and bonuses to obtain, and there's a techno beat over the stages we got to play that reacts to the action. Each time we fired a weapon and made contact with an enemy, we were treated to a different, musical sound effect. Remember how you created your own tunes in Lumines as you dropped blocks? The same thing is happening here except with destruction.

When you blow up four same-colored creatures in a row, they'll drop a like-colored power-up that grants your ship a nifty weapon for a limited amount of time. The red block gives you bombs that wipe out small sections of enemies, the green block gives you a broad shot that sprays out and kills the bad guys in its path, and the blue one grants the best upgrade of all -- a thunderous blue laser that obliterates column after column of foes.

Every so often, you'll be met with a roulette wheel of enemies and what you shoot selects what bonus level you'll enter. One level challenged us to hit a certain number of spaceships as the crafts zigged around the screen with a bunch of other bad guys and another level had us eliminating everything on the screen.

As our painfully short demo ended, we were brought ship to face with a massive boss. Basically a really big traditional space invader, the creature had smaller enemies circling him. We blasted those guys away and dodged fire before knocking out some blocks and taking aim at the creature's differently colored heart. Once that was taken care of the, the beast was done and we got our stats and rank.

So, Space Invaders Extreme is awesome. It sounds amazing, looks good and is a ton of fun to play. The one down point we found in the gameplay was that there was no button or combo that could make our ship move super-fast, but it wasn't that big of a deal. We'll have more Extreme as the summer release gets closer, but until then, you can download the same demo we played from FilePlanet.