Alien Shooter: is no
Brand X game. That title is both blah and misleading, as this Sigma Team effort
is actually a gung-ho retro take on the action-packed isometric shooter genre
that had a brief moment in the sun about a decade ago, not the second-rate FPS
that the box cover implies. The game may be a little too self-consciously
old-school for some, but the action is so fast, furious, and blithely bloody
that it's hard to resist getting swept up in the carnage.
he story itself is pretty bare-bones. It's the
postapocalyptic future, you're working as a mercenary for the MAGMA Energy
Corporation (described as "the leader of many things energetical,"
whatever that means), and a lot of ugly aliens need to be blown away. Chances
are you've heard this sort of thing a few times before. This skeletal framework
is sufficient to support a game where you do little more than smear ET blood
all over the walls, and Sigma has done great work with the RPG aspects of the
game. Rolling up initial characters is spiced up with the ability to pick a
special perk. These options are fairly limited, encompassing just eight
different choices, but they include some nifty ideas modeled after what you
could give your character in the Fallout games and are given similarly humorous
descriptions. For instance, you can be a vampire, with the ability to suck
health out of enemies, or a hypnotist, who gets to take over the minds of
baddies. Beyond this, though, the RPG personality of the game is limited. After
picking a perk, you choose from between eight premade characters, although at
least during gameplay you level up and can apply experience points to buff
typical shooter skills like the ability to use pistols, shotguns, and machine
guns.
Not that any wimpy
RPG stuff is necessary. Frenetically blasting aliens is Alien Shooter's sole
reason for existence, so in this respect the title is dead-on. The game's
personality is a cross between Robotron, DOOM, and Serious Sam. Pretty much
every mission is a corridor crawl to find some item, rescue a few trapped
buddies, or simply kill a big bad. You regularly get trapped in rooms and
swarmed by thousands of bugs (literally--the game tracks your kills and they
seem to go into four digits each and every level). Many areas are dimly lit or
pitch-black, so you have to move forward carefully using the narrow beam of a
flashlight to pick up any aliens scuttling your way. And the carnage is
typically so intense that by the time you've finished with a room, you'll have
painted every last inch of the floors and walls with alien blood and gore. It
ain't pretty, but it sure gets the adrenaline flowing.
Aside from the
killing, though, there isn't much here. The nonstop blasting gets a bit numbing
after a little while, so the game is best taken in short doses. There are lots
of secret areas to discover, but little to find in them aside from power-ups,
weapons, and ammo, and these items are so prevalent in the main sections of
levels that you don't need to do any wandering to pick up more of them. Most of
the exploring is pretty simplistic, too. Generally, if you see something green,
you should run up to it, as it's likely a power-up or a button activating a
secret door. If you see something red, that means no-go, or that you need to
find a key to open that particular door. You can jazz things up by skipping the
campaign for survival mode, which comes in a last-man-standing variant where
you blast bugs until you drop, and a career option spread over five levels.
Neither option changes the complexion of gameplay, of course. The same can
presumably be said about multiplayer, although this couldn't be tested as it
only supports LAN and direct IP connections.
You probably need to
have the nostalgia gene to really get into Alien Shooter: Vengeance, but you
don't have to be an old fogey to get some base-level enjoyment out of this
gleeful shoot-'em-up. Look past the dumb name and give it a shot.
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