Alpha Storm

The Good
Alpha Storm is not a very well-known game, and on the surface it may appear to be yet another of countless Doom clones that were all too common in the mid-1990s. With Quake II released in the same year as this game, Alpha Storm would appear to be a hopelessly outdated game by a backwater developer.

That is, if it were nothing but yet another first-person shooter. It isn't.

Alpha Storm is, at its most basic level, a sandbox game. You are given a single starship, the Eradicator Prototype, and you are free to explore every nook and cranny on the ship - or just roam around it if you so desire (which is also a good way to familiarize yourself with the ship's layout if you get boarded, but more on that later). A ship's main purpose is to take one to another location, and you can do that too - the game is set in a star cluster of about several dozen systems, and you can visit every single one of them whenever you like.

The star systems you explore are not empty. They are populated by three factions - the Imperials, the Pirates, and the dinosaur-like Vargs, which are sadly all hostile to you. Combat is divided into space combat and on-deck combat, where you can personally board an enemy ship or space station (once you have disabled their shields) and look for devices to install on your own ship or just "consume" them for mana that powers your character's psionic abilities. Your own ship can also get boarded if you are careless enough, in which case you need to be quick enough to kill all the boarders before anything gets stolen by them. And finally, there are planetary bases, which play more like a traditional Doom-style FPS, and which hold pieces of the Nova Bomb and the Stasis Device, two devices that you need to assemble to complete the game.

The devices you steal from enemy ships range from essential systems such as reactors or shields to weapons and electronic warfare systems that give you special abilities such as cloaking your own ship, decloaking enemy ships, detonating enemy projectiles, and even disguising yourself as another ship, allowing you to pass through a hostile system without attracting enemy attention. Enemy electronic warfare systems can also be disabled or weakened using special devices called the Hacker and the Jammer. As you play the game, you must keep upgrading or replacing your ship's systems - not only can you encounter higher-level versions of the same device, but your ship's systems also get damaged in combat.

Finally, while this is a matter of personal taste, I really liked the look of the ships' interiors, especially the Eradicator Prototype and the Varg ships (though Varg doors could have been a tad less noisy).

The Bad
Like I said at the beginning, the game is still flawed in many ways.

The biggest flaw is the story, which is very much an "excuse plot". The evil Dark Beings have come to destroy all life in the galaxy (they leave nothing but empty void where star systems used to be, Star Control 3-style), and you are there to stop them. Which is where the story is also at odds with the gameplay, since you are supposed to save the galaxy's denizens from extinction, yet you spend most of the game slaughtering them, cleaning out entire systems just as thoroughly as the Dark Beings would (though the stars and the planets remain in place).

The short FMV cutscenes that play during the game are very low-quality, and none of them has sound. The worst idea by far was programming these cutscenes to play during space combat, where all they do is distract the player from what is happening on the screen. And you do need to have the cutscenes in the game, since the Dark Beings' Black Ship won't get disabled if the corresponding cutscene is missing.

A really weird design decision is making parts of enemy ships closed off, which makes the game look unfinished. It's not, since all ships of the same type have the exact same layout, so closed-off areas were presumably added to make boarding different ships of the same type more "fresh" each time. However, instead of feeling fresh, it feels annoying, and it's doubly annoying when you can't get a device that happens to be in a sealed-off area.

The music in the FPS part of the game is rather dull, and can get very annoying since the game won't switch to another track until you return to your ship and go to the piloting screen (or load another saved game).

The ending is also very disappointing, but that is consistent with the overall quality of the story and the cutscenes.

The Bottom Line
In conclusion, this game is far from perfect, and feels downright amateurish at times. Still, I've found it very enjoyable.