Hands-on with Face Raiders on the 3DS

If the idea of your friends' faces bursting through your living room walls and attacking you makes you at all uneasy, you may want to give Face Raiders a miss.

Then again, you'd be missing out on a wonderful 3D gaming experience, unlike anything you've played before.

Face Raiders comes built-in to your Nintendo 3DS, and - as with the Augmented Reality mini-games - it serves as a glorified tech demo, emphasising what the 3DS can do.

Utilising the 3DS camera, the game uses your surroundings as a play area. Enemies can come from all directions - in front of you, to the sides, and even above and behind.

Indeed, you'll need to turn all the way round to keep yourself alive. This is not a game to play sitting down. Well, unless you have an office chair that spins.

Face Raiders begins by asking you to take a photo of yourself. Line up the markings on the screen with your eyes and nose and the game will determine whether you are male, female, young, old, or 'Unidentified'.

If you've played Faceez on the DSi, you'll know exactly how this works. A 3D version of your face will then pop out of the photo wearing a helmet and an evil grin.

Indicators begin to appear on screen showing which direction you need to swivel in. Follow them and you'll come face-to-face with a hovering version of your own head.

The idea is to quickly but carefully fire with the A button, and take all your heads out. Hitting multiple heads in a row without missing will boost your combo and ultimately your final score.

Faces don't just pop up from anywhere - they come through the walls. Cracks in your surroundings appear and enemies burst through, leaving gaps into another dimension behind them.

Hence it's best to play Face Raiders in a room without too much clutter on the walls to get the full effect - it doesn't look as good when enemies crash through your bookcase or picture frame.

Get the right environment, and Face Raiders is rather exciting. The way the game uses your room as part of the level design is really clever, and it genuinely looks like things are bursting through your walls.

Once you've defeated yourself, you can then take photos of friends (or enemies) and watch as they invade your living room too.

There are multiple levels of difficulty, with boss battles at the end of each run. The action eventually becomes rather tough - the Final Stage in particular took us a good few attempts to beat.

Throughout play, the game takes 'Sneaky Snaps' of the action, and present the photos to you at the end of play, so you can choose to keep or bin them.

It also saves every encapsulated face and stores them in the Face Collection, where they'll all sit around winking at each other.

Scrolling through your collected faces is hilarious, and the expressions that they pull kept us entertained for a good while.

Our hope is that developers will see what Face Raiders can do and build on the idea. Imagine being able to take a photo of yourself during a game, and then giving the main hero your face.

Ideas like this could really give 3DS titles a lot of personality, and provide gaming experiences like we've never seen before.