Compare Infested Planet prices across 50+ stores and find the best deal. Developed by Rocket Bear Games. Published by Rocket Bear Games. Released on 3/6/2014. Available on PC. Genres: Action, Indie, Strategy. Metacritic score: 75/100.
Outnumbered five marines against a hundred thousand aliens, and the swarm gets smarter every time you take ground. A lean tactical RTS with a mutation system that punishes single-strategy comfort zones hard.
I've spent more time than I care to admit watching a tidy defensive line fall apart the moment the aliens rolled a mutation I hadn't planned for. That's the core loop of Infested Planet in a sentence: you push forward, the hive responds by evolving, and suddenly your carefully spec'd squad of five is desperately wrong-tooled for the threat in front of you.
The mechanical foundation is tighter than it looks. <br>Build Points are your single currency, earned by capturing hive nodes and towing resource crates back to controlled territory. You spend BP on upgrading your five marines into specialized roles - riflemen, fusion shotgunners, minigunners, snipers, medics, scouts - or on static structures like turrets, artillery cannons, shield generators, and helicopter strike bays. The twist that separates Infested Planet from a standard tower-defense push is the mutation counter: every hive you capture triggers a new alien upgrade drawn from a pool of 33 mutations. Burrowing Hives can pop up inside your own lines. Carapace shells harden enemy towers against bullets, forcing a switch to explosives. Necrophage turns your fallen marines into clone eggs that hatch hostiles if you don't grenade them fast enough. On the Terminus difficulty maps, the mutation draw is even weighted against your current loadout, so the game is actively reading your strategy and countering it. That is a genuinely clever piece of adaptive AI design that most indie RTS titles do not attempt.
The campaign runs 17 missions with a branching structure - a main story path, plus side branches with randomized missions that pay out currency for unlocking the full arsenal between runs. Progression is forgiving in one specific way: money flows in even on a loss or surrender, so struggling players can buy extra marines or better starting equipment for subsequent attempts. That said, the late-game difficulty spike is real. Missions 14 onward regularly demand that you juggle three simultaneous threats, and pathfinding hiccups can turn a tight push into a fumble at the worst moment. The camera also only pans via mouse-edge scrolling by default, which feels archaic and costs precious seconds when a burrowing hive pops up across the map.
Beyond the campaign there is a Skirmish mode across eight difficulty tiers, a custom mission builder where you can control map size, enemy composition, and which specific mutations are in the pool, and weekly challenge maps with leaderboards for speed-runners. No multiplayer, but the competitive layer through those weekly challenges gives the replayability a longer tail than it first appears. Steam user reception sits at 94 percent positive across over 1,800 reviews, which is unusually strong consensus for a game this niche. The Trickster's Arsenal DLC adds further weapons and the Planetary Campaign DLC extends the map count, both worth considering if the base game clicks.
Who is this for? If your RTS comfort zone is massive armies and base-building economies, Infested Planet will feel stripped down almost to the point of austerity. There is one resource, a small unit count, no tech tree in the traditional sense. But if you enjoy games where every decision has an immediate tactical consequence and where the AI is actively trying to punish your habits, this is exactly the kind of tight, replayable design that gets a second tab open in your head at 2am. The tutorial respects newcomers with a gentle on-ramp before the mutation system fully opens up, and the ability to undo upgrades and reallocate BP mid-mission removes most of the feel-bad moments from early-game misreads.
Diego, Scout Team
