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Alien Breed :
Evolution EPISODE 1
Everyone remembers
Worms right? Well remember that big Team 17 logo that always flashed up
before the game started? Those guys are back, and they are on Xbox Live,
with their latest title Alien Breed. You may recall the title, and
that’s because it was originally released in the early nineties for the
Amiga and DOS, but now it’s been beefed up for Next Gen.
Expanding more on
the original story line, the game presents itself in a comic book style
with cut scene framed, and the entire game spliced into five chapters,
with three episodes planned to complete the story. The first follows
space engineer Theo Conrad on the spaceship Leopold with collides with a
strange ghost ship. From the ghost ship a mass of Alien predators
leaping ship to the Leopold and decimating the crew, leaving Conrad to
fight of the hoards himself armed with a few weapons and a android named
Mia.
Keeping its
originality of a top down shooter, it has also kept the simplistic
button mappings to ensure a simple pick up and play style that most XBLA
games should have. Left stick moves, Right stick aims, and right trigger
shoots, with the rest of the buttons being occupied by various secondary
tasks such as melee or activating equipment. The game play is staggered,
you can spend a good deal of time fighting off impossible odds of alien
numbers, and then you can have what feels like an eternity performing a
stock ‘puzzle task’ of searching a body or finding a door way, these
tasks are unavoidable and have to be performed before moving on to the
next level.
This can be bypassed though by loading the Assault game as
opposed to the Story mode. The real juice in the game though is the
multiplayer aspect with 2 player Co-op available as well as Xbox Live
Co-op, guaranteeing plenty of headset shouting and epilepsy inducing
screen flashing as you rifle of blinding round after round. There is
plenty of interactivity in the environment as explosions, electric belts
and fiery surges can all dwindle your health as one of the many
onslaughts of enemy feast upon you. The AI of the enemy isn’t fantastic
and they will tend to repeat the same moves based on what ‘level’ enemy
they are, but the sheer number of them and they speed of the surge is
enough to keep anyone on their toes.
There is certainly
a lot more polish on this reincarnation than its original, with rich
environments and fluid motion provided by Epics Unreal 3 engine and a
perfect spine tingling soundtrack to immerse you in the spaceship, and
dread the inevitable Alien hoard. Overall, there is a great title here,
at 800 points, it’s pretty cheap too. The major disappointment is its
length, there isn’t a great deal of replay ability in the episode, with
just five levels and a boss, the decision to split into three episodes
has obviously kept the cost down but at the expense of satisfaction. But
at around the price of a large pizza, I guess there isn’t much to
complain about there. |
