Alien Shooter: Vengeance
Alien Shooter: Vengeance. The name alone should send chills down your spine.
Look, it's got aliens. It's got guns. And the aliens seek vengeance. Or maybe it's you seeking vengeance on the aliens. The world may never know the truth, but CDV's latest budget title sure brings a few chuckles when you mention the name.
Alien Shooter Vengeance is a an isometric 2D Shooter (think Diablo meets Smash TV) with 2d Graphics and fancy 3D Lighting effects. It's a particularly decent looking title, and the lighting effects are pretty impressive. The game is the sequel to
Alien Shooter by developers Sigma Team. A unique feature of the title is it allows for a mix of RPG elements, allowing you to create a customize a character as you blast the endless aliens.
As you progress through the endless waves of aliens, you'll gain experience and be able to level up abilities like speed, health, and different weapon inefficiencies. The problem with this is, after the initial character creation screen, you are never told what each 10x10 pixel icon represents in the level up screen. At times I wasn't sure if I was putting points into shotguns, rifles or bazookas. The endless aliens themselves offer little variety, though CDV claims about 50 in the game, most are just color or size mods of 6 or 7 base varieties. On top of that, the
ai code probably looks something like this:
Code:
10 Locate(Player);
20 MoveTo(Player);
30 If Alive Then 10;
The single player campaign does have some cool moments. Above and beyond the cheesy soundtrack and horrible voice acting there lies a somewhat decent mission structure which brings NPC characters along for the ride to help blast the aliens. The sheer number of aliens on the screen at once is pretty insane, and the blood and gore that ensues is somewhat satisfying. There's a 20 different types of gadgets and weapons including flare guns, radars, bazookas, AK-47's, Shotguns and even battle drones to help assist you. All of these items can be purchased before the start of the missions at the armory, and you are allowed to carry one of each type. The game even tries
scare you by having darkly lit rooms with only a flashlight to show the way as well as the infamous
red light effect in which you know the baddies are coming.
Of course though, after the initial ooohs and aaahs wear off, you are left with a monotonous shooter that requires very little skill. Basically aim in one direction and hold the fire button down. There's a few other issues as well, being a 2d based game with fixed sprites, the maximum resolution allowed is 1024x768. There's also an issue when changing weapons where the game
pauses for a good second or two. There was also and issue with the install process, that is, the fact the install took over 29 minutes. That's right, the installation of Alien Shooter: Vengeance (2 CDs) took longer than Windows Vista.
Apparently the game offers on line multiplayer and leaderboards. Neither of them seemed to work, or rather I was the only person on the planet earth actually playing it.
Conclusion
In the age of downloadable content and
arcade games, this title seems like a perfect fit for a PS3 Online or XBLive Arcade. The game itself is best experienced in short bursts, and is fun and entertaining in those short bursts. Now if we can only do something about the title.
Score:
3 out of 5 Evil Eyes
The Good:
+ Solid Graphics with fancy 3d Lighting
+ RPG Elements add something different to a shooter
The Bad:
- Gets pretty monotonous
- Voice Acting
- Difficult icons
The Ugly:
- Limited Screen Resolution
- Insane install times
