Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons: The earth explodes is the second chapter of the original commander keen trilogy, created by Id software in the early 1990's. You play once again as Billy Blaze the eight year old genius who decided to build a rocket in his back yard out of old soup cans and other objects. He then entitled his home made rocket the “Bean-with-bacon Megarocket” and that’s just awesome. You play as his “alter Ego” Commander Keen, defender of the planet earth.
After retrieving all of his rocket’s missing parts from the vorticons in the first game, Commander keen travels home, only to find the Vorticon mother ship beat him to it.
Keen infiltrates the mother ship and has to disable each of the Tantalus Rays targeting different Earth cities. During this adventure, Keen learns that the Vorticons used to be a peaceful race, but were enslaved by the mysterious Grand Intellect.
The graphics are exactly the same as the first game, as it is running on the same engine, which also means the controls are exactly the same as well. You still have your pogo stick, and you need to press the pogo and jump button at the same time to shoot. In fact, this game is practically the same as the first game, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing seeing as the first game was rather exceptional. This game has you going through levels with different textures,
but pretty much the same enemies from the first game.
The only real big difference between the first and second game besides the levels, is the enemy placement and ammo placement. In the first game ammo was scarce and you needed to conserve it much more by evading enemies. While in this game ammo is more abundant, but that is because the enemies are far more abundant a well. There are often hordes of enemies in single areas where you will have to take them all out because you can’t possibly get passed them without shooting them all.
In all Commander Keen 2 is a fantastic game that should be tried by anyone who enjoyed the first installment. The game play and graphics are more of the same, but it all pays off to further the interesting plot of Commander Keen, and plus the game play is fun, so what more do you need?
