This game is more or less an isometric Metroid, although with a heavier focus on action and less well polished level design.

You're a female bounty hunter with a special suit sent by the military to recover any valuable data from a research facility that was holding the only known specimens of an alien life form very adept at assimilation. (So it's basically Metroid Fusion in that case).

The locations are colorful and varried, as well as the enemy types being fairly diverse and all each annoying in their own unique ways, but that one words sums up a lot of this game: Annoying. A big part of the Metroid-esque upgrades you find for your suit are just different elements for your blaster. You open a toggle wheel with R, and can switch to eventually six different weapons. The issue that comes up eventually is that while some enemies are weak to certain elements, other are strong against them, and have their attack and speed buffed when exposed to it. This becomes an even larger issue because when you kill an enemy with their weakness, they create a zone of that element around them damaging other enemies in their immediate vicinity. Granted, stuff tends to die pretty fast and you stop time when you open your toggle wheel, but it just gets kind of annoying when the enemies stack in such a fashion that the one you want to kill is just behind the one you're unintentionally powering up.

The level design isn't really great, and I put that mostly up to their insistence on using keys. Unlike Metroid, there're no optional areas to get life or ammo capacity power ups. You get blobs of health/exp through slain enemies (in a style basically identical to Metroid Fusion) and this just raises your base HP and damage output. But you NEED to explore everywhere, because you NEED to find EVERY key card. If you miss even one, you'll be stuck and can't progress forward, and especially in the last and second to last stages, it can be a very serious pain in the ass to navigate through the huge tunnel systems and large open spaces via the pretty bad map system. The game even throws branching paths at you to make it more likely that you'll not take one way, forget you didn't go that way, and then get lost hunting desperately for a key card. At the very least, the game does give a chime when you're in a room with/close to a key card.

The biggest extra pain in the ass when it comes to getting lost is in how you're "infected." In terms of story, your suit doesn't completely protect you from the infection of the alien hive-mind, and it always slowly building up in side of you. As such, you effectively have a constant timer which you're limited by, and you need to go to save rooms constantly to bring it back down to 1% and to fully heal. The save rooms are fairly frequent, even more frequent than in Metroid at times, but considering that it effectively even gives you a hard time limit for bosses, it really is just a bad design choice in my opinion. It makes what are already painful searches for key cards even worse because you're constantly stopping off in a save room. However, I will give the game props for a pretty cool death animation if you die from infection damage.

The action is pretty darn good. The bosses especially are great, with all of them being very well designed, and they all felt like a legitimate challenge with all of them having multiple phases with changing weaknesses. The bosses were probably my favorite part of the game, even though the final boss was a ridiculous fiasco of dodging and trying to fit in time to aim a shot to take out some of his massive HP. The only complaint I have is that you often need to move so precisely and frantically in those battles that playing on my heavy NEW 3DS XL began to hurt my left hand after a while. I would recommend either picking up the GBA version of this game (which is totally identical and you're not missing anything with the terrible map on the bottom screen) or playing it on an original DS where the D-pad is in a more comfortable location.

The difficulty curve is very nice however, and I never felt there was an unfair spike in difficulty at any point. Just be sure to take the time to collect the XP orbs, because otherwise you'll probably be underleveled. The game accounts for this though, and despite it being a 7-8 hour game, assuming there's no points of persistent lostness, it has not 2, but 3 extra difficulty modes past the "Normal" which is what is unlocked at the start. Beat Normal, you get Hard mode. Beat Hard, and you get Insane Mode. Beat that, and you get Ultra mode. I don't like the game nearly enough to try Hard Mode, but I thought Normal Mode was plenty hard enough, at least in terms of the bosses. As long as you're persistant at picking up health orbs and try to kill most of what you come across, you shouldn't really have to worry about dying from normal enemies.

Verdict: Decent. If you're really starved for a sci-fi action game on DS, you can certainly do worse. The only cardinal sin it really has against it is the level design, and if you can look past that, I think you'll at least find it fun, although perhaps not engaging enough to beat it. If you find it for cheap, don't be afraid to pick it up, because you might really like what you find.

I remember when this game first came out and I wrote it off as a Metroid Fusion clone. That's not entirely untrue, though the cloned aspects are largely in story and setting. Jenosa Arma, an infectious parasite, bounty hunter, and a blaster arm are the extent of the similarities, the gameplay itself is entirely different. Scurge: Hive is an isometric Metroidvania, an angle almost entirely unseen in the genre, and apparently for good reason. This makes perspective and depth challenging to gauge, creating frustrating platforming and combat moments. The combat is also frustrating beyond the view due to enemy weapon weaknesses requiring constant swapping between weapons, which stilts the flow of the combat. Not that there's a solid pace in the game to begin with--there is an infection mechanic which requires going to save room before infection reaches 100% otherwise you'll start taking tick damage. In practice, this wasn't a major threat, but it ended up marring the exploration. In combination with too frequent enemies, it makes getting through the game's areas more annoying than engaging. It's too bad, because there is a core here that's interesting and unique, but it feels like they focused on the wrong elements instead of playing into the strengths of this alternate angle.

I'm a sucker for all things isometric, so this has been on my backlog for a while.

An own-brand metroidy action adventure with loads of cool noises and neat ability upgrades, it's good and fun for a while, but eventually i got tired of being repeatedly knocked off of a slow-moving platform by way too many enemies.

Impressive for a GBA game, but DS touchscreen aiming would have helped so much with the frustration. Or maybe I just need to git gud. But who has the time?