Listeria Wars might have you questioning the 10-second rule. The main character drops food on the floor, picks it up and eats it, which introduces all sorts of pathogens into his system. He’s a hygiene liability, and it leaves him ill, bedbound and even comatose several times across the game.
Listeria, or listeria monocytogenes, you see, is a foodborne bacterium that’s becoming increasingly common. It’s nasty, and Listeria Wars has chosen to make it the bad guy of the game. To defeat it, you’re not pumping the stomach or downing some laxatives: you’re playing as the body’s immune system, battling against intruders in a microscopic game of tower defence.
In an indeterminate part of the guy’s body (we never dared to ask: it’s all fleshy pipes and pustules), a simple battlefield is created. Plants vs Zombies is a sensible comparison here, as the arena never changes shape and can effectively be thought of in terms of lanes. You can place your autoimmune warriors anywhere on the left half of the screen, and the enemy listeria appear on the right. While there are no lanes drawn on as a grid, you can move between the invisible channels pretty readily, as there’s room for three waves of attacks: top, middle and bottom.
Things proceed as any tower defence player would expect. As soon as you place your first white blood cell, the timer starts ticking and enemies begin to appear in waves. They trundle over to you with the aim of disappearing over the left side of the screen, infecting a colon or whatever it is they do.
Over time, and by killing these pathogens, you gain SC, which is the currency for buying more towers. The game starts simply with mastocytes that act like pawns, with limited movement and strength, before handing you NK cells that are effectively rocket launcher units and tanks called basophil. All of these can be dropped down and repositioned with a stretchy arrow once the unit has been selected. None of them can be upgraded in-game, though; what you drop is what you get.
After several waves, one of thirty levels is completed and checked off on a level select screen which looks cunningly like a desk calendar. This is your chance to upgrade the base stats of your units with a second currency, which looks something like a DNA helix. Strength, defence and speed can all be dialed up on a per unit basis.
That’s the shape of it. The levels never change but the enemies get progressively more aggressive. They snake at you like the old Nokia game, or they pump out of APC-like bigger units. You’ve got to be on your game if you want to keep up with where they’re swarming from.
We wish we could say we enjoyed it. There’s plenty that’s exciting about the setup, for example, as the Osmosis Jones concept of hopping in a body and performing tower defense on a dying body is honestly great. The big LED screen at the back of the game, where you can watch what’s happening to your hapless dude is also fab. It’s completely distracting at the worst times, but it’s some lovely context for the enemy waves.
But it’s just so riddled with smaller issues that eventually it’s overwhelmed. A doctor would have a nightmare working out a diagnosis, as there are so many contributing factors.
There’s the controls, which didn’t need to be this fiddly. The cursor is slow, moving through treacle, but it’s a professional sprinter in comparison to the arrow that controls troop movement. Moving a unit from the middle of the screen to the end of the screen is a long, drawn out process, as you stretch the arrow like it’s made out of taffy. If you could move multiple units at once, it might have been okay, but each one has to be dragged individually, and your reinforcements will often arrive well after the original units died.
Balancing is curious, too. Our difficulty curve would look like one of those spiky WW1 German helmets. We had a ridiculously easy time of it at the start, as the first thirteen levels passed without incident. You just have to keep on top of your upgrading, dropping down units as soon as you can afford them, and dabble in that classic tower defence pattern of building barriers before sticking ranged units behind.
But then level fourteen happened. Those APC units turned up, and – through much trial and error – we learned that there was only one way of killing them. Save yourself the headache: use the macrophages, a kind of exploding unit, to beat the level. We needed an upgraded macrophage, though, which meant grinding the same level to get enough currency, or using the (moderately unfair) re-speccing system which chews up your currency. But once we had them, it was finally possible.
After that, we were past the spike and onto the other side of the helmet. Listeria Wars is just slightly too cheesable, with simple, repeatable tactics that will get you through every situation. Fully upgraded macrophages, stored at the far end of the screen, will kill everything. We spent whole levels without seeing a single enemy. On occasion, you might need some ranged units or the odd macrophage wall in the middle of the park to catch sprinting units, but ultimately a single tactic will get you to the end of the game. There’s no motivation to change your plans, because doing so would mean upgrading some lesser units, and that would be a hell of a grind.
If it was fun or strategic, the grind might feel worthwhile, but it’s too cumbersome to get there. The spectre of Plants vs Zombies hangs over it (oh, what we’d give for a new, proper PvZ without mobile or microtransactions), as nothing Listeria Wars does is a patch on it. Take the battlefield, for example. In Listeria Wars, it’s hard to tell whether your unit is covering some or all lanes, and it ultimately comes down to guesswork. In Plants vs Zombies, there was that constant sense that you were in control, and losing was your fault, not some absent lane-lines.
As a quick tower-defence shot in the arm, Listeria Wars just about works. There’s a cracking immune system theme, which makes a change from all the towers and turrets that we are used to. But it’s so overrun with minor issues that we eventually had to put it down. If you can hack its slowness, poor controls and inexact unit placement then there’s an easy 1000 Gamerscore here, but everyone else should probably keep two metres away.
