Alien Shooter – Vengeance
Score: 80%
In short:
Take Diablo and add a hefty portion of Serious Sam… sound good? It is.
In slightly more detail:
The ‘Shooter’ series has been around for a while. Developer Sigma Team hasn’t been straying very far from the formula, either. In Alien Shooter – Vengeance, you are tasked with exterminating an alien threat. You do this from an isometric view similar to Diablo. The graphics are decent, and moderate PCs should be able to handle it. My 2-year old HP laptop choked during intense moments… and the game is 90% tense moments.
You start by choosing a character from a roster of men and women. Each one has slightly different stats in various physical attributes like strength or speed, or weapon proficiencies. As you complete tasks you will gain levels. Each time you level up, you get 5 points to spend on any attribute you like. Pro Tip: Focus on a couple areas in which you want to excel. More on that later.
As you progress through the game you will also acquire money. At various points you will have access to a shop in which you can purchase (or repair) armor, ammunition, weapons, cybernetic enhancements, medical gear and other equipment. I don’t remember exactly what the enhancements are called, but you can use up to three at a time. Each one imparts bonuses to one or more stats, and they can be quite useful. Sometimes they are even necessary, since access to more powerful weapons is reliant on you having a minimum weapon proficiency. Enhancements can help out a great deal in this regard.
Weapons come in 5 classes: pistols, shotguns, machine guns, explosives, and energy (power) weapons. You start out with a lowly pistol but can upgrade pretty quickly. You can carry one weapon for each category, which sounds great at first. In practice, however, you will probably not want to do this. Ammunition takes up precious inventory slots, and you will need a LOT of it. For this reason you will probably only carry 2 or 3 weapons. I went through the majority of the game carrying a shotgun, a machine gun, and a laser mini-gun. I almost never used the explosives, and quit using a pistol as soon as I could. There is also a flame thrower, but I found it to not be as practical as I’d hoped.
There are 15 levels in the game, each one taking about 25 minutes to traverse. You could spend longer if you wanted to find every secret. Yes, this game has Doom-style secrets, and many of them are not obvious. Another easter egg- if you play near Christmas, the title screen changes as well. A major complaint is that there is no quick save, or mid-level save of any kind. It’s all or nothing. You get a couple lives, and health kits automatically get used when needed. Playing on normal difficulty, I never died until level 8… at which point the game’s difficulty takes a steep incline. I’m not ashamed to admit it- I cheated my ass off to finish this game. Having played the entire thing (something I don’t do that often, so when I do it, you know the game is fun) I have to wonder how someone could play through it without cheating. Literal hordes of beasts attack you from all sides. The most challenging aspect, introduced in level 8, is monster generators, ala Gauntlet. They have a lot of health, and essentially have built-in meat shields due to the fact that you have to wade through an ever-growing sea of monsters just to reach them. Explosives are helpful against these devices, but the early rocket launchers shoot so slow that I didn’t use them very often. As for the cheats, you can get money and skills, kill all the monsters, etc. But the most useful cheat is the ability to spawn a store whenever you need it: some levels do not contain a store. This is confounding because you’ll find yourself with a full inventory that you want to sell off, as well as needing to re-supply. If you do choose to cheat, I recommend that you do it in moderation; it’s easy to go too far, making yourself a walking God. That can be fun too, I suppose.
There is limited multiplayer, but I didn’t try it. A cooperative mode is simply one survival map where you just hold out as long as you can. If the campaign had co-op, it would have gotten a much higher score. I also knocked points off for general polish- voice overs (hilariously bad) often don’t match the on-screen text, for example. There’s also a major plot point that is left completely unresolved, not that it matters because this game does not require a plot. Let’s hope the upcoming Zombie Shooter 2 has full co-op.
Final Thoughts:
My first play-through lasted 5 hours and 4 minutes. I murdered 18, 374 creatures in that time. That’s just over 1 kill a second, and I don’t think there was ever a time that I wasn’t having fun. That’s pretty impressive for such a simple game. While a quick save would have been nice, the levels are short enough to load up when you have 30 minutes and want some simple, bloody fun.
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