Alien Shooter: Vengeance

The Good
As far as game play is concerned this game stands 100% for it's title; Alien Shooter 2 is exactly what it's name says: mindless blasting and shooting of hordes of alien creatures. And when I'm saying hordes I really mean thousands! Take your pick on a hero, buy some weapons and ammo and off you go.

In fact Alien Shooter 2 is the only game in which I've seen so many enemies on the screen. These guys come in crowds! Not one or two, five is the number of the easy going welcoming committees, whereas that number goes up exponentially very soon. Despite the fact that too many characters will populate your screen most of the time, they are coded smartly as not to draw too much CPU resources and therefore slow down the frame rates. The game runs very smoothly on a normal modern machine, even when the battle heat is on.

So the basic mechanism of A.S.2 is this: kill as many aliens as you can, survive to the end of the stage, earn money and experience, buy more ammo, weapons and equipment and get out to blood fill the rooms of the next level.

Talking about blood, you should see some screenshots to believe this, most of the rooms floors get fully covered in blood. The amount of blood and shredded carcasses is massive! Certainly do not play this around dinner time! The carnage guts-splashing animations are amazing, as the whole graphical levels are kept high in this game. Although at first the sprites might seem a bit small, once you get used to them they make a nice tidy -or untidy more like- environment for you to play. Normally I do not like isometric displayed games, but in Alien Shooter 2's case I'll make an exception, the game looks really good.

Although the game is mainly about killing, it offers a few sub tasks in between such as finding door pass cards, disabling systems, putting explosives on hardware etc, which don't make such a big difference, as in order to do these tasks you have to kill a few thousand aliens of all sizes, shapes and colors. The variety of the enemy formats is quite good, having all kinds of alien form presented to you; from baby alien spiders, to large dinosaur-like monsters, to bio-mechanical creatures... you name it, you shoot it!... or the other way around!

Apart from the alien population variety, there's a wide selection of weapons, add-ons and equipment to be acquired on your quest. Frankly the selection of weapons is massive and it's up to you to discover more funds in the levels in order to acquire the deadlier and more expensive weapons. These come in certain types like: pistols, SMGs, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, laser rifles, etc. The selection is huge and it caters for every style and pocket. But frankly you'll need to spend a lot if you want to stay alive from this menace. Not only that, there's the option to mount various cannons, or drive around in armored vehicles with cannon turrets just to enjoy a bit of mindless carnage.

Finally adding up to the package there are eleven good tunes that play on the action scenes, that is most of the time, they are good heavy tunes that get you in the right mood, especially if your weapon is loaded with plenty of ammo!

The Bad
First of all the game has some major character movement issues of the main character around the surrounding environments and due to their complexity, sometimes you're getting trapped between an environment setting and there's no way out of this. I've got trapped twice in a spot and the only way to get out of it was to restart the whole level from the beginning.

In term of movement, the game uses a system which has been widely used in RPGs, right click on the cursor to move to that spot and left click to shoot. This might be good for RPGs, but in such a rapid action game as this one the movement system fails in my opinion, as it gets very confusing, especially in hot and overcrowded situations.

The lack of an option to save your game in between the levels makes up for a very frustrating experience, as each level gets to be too long to play simply because you have to wait for each wave of aliens to finish before stepping a bit further on where a fresh wave comes towards yourself and so on.

Finishing or entering a level does not guarantee that you'll get the chance to buy or trade weapons in the shop. There are some series of levels that don't have a weapons shop, as an example I think they are levels 5,6 and 7 where you have to complete all of them with the weapons you've acquired in level 5, or those few you find scattered around. I think that the game really suffers from that lack of in between weapon shops, and a better level laying out could only be better for the players nerves. At least the save game option could save a few broken keyboards and screens :)

Most of all, the game is really suffering from the lack to save the game option whenever the player wishes in conjunction with over-sized and repetitive crowds of enemies that in the end is a waste of time rather than an enjoying gaming experience. I really see no point in shooting 50 aliens in a row, only to walk to the corner of the room just to be attacked by another 50 aliens and then on the corridor to have another 50 of them and so on... doing exactly that for the whole duration of the game.

The Bottom Line
Take it or leave it, Alien Shooter 2 is about killing aliens, millions of'em! And that's the only thing it's good at! It's the perfect remedy for a bad day when you get back home really pissed off with everything! Switch off the cell, lock the door, turn on the pc and the speakers loud, fire up Alien Shooter 2 and you'll feel relieved!

Certainly it has it's flaws, serious ones, but then again it's perfect if big flashy guns appeal to you, big and so many of them you'll have a problem of choice. And when you choose it's pay back time - big time! No matter it's flaws and frustration it causes sometimes due to it's awkward movement, or the difficult and quite odd situations it puts you in, you'll keep coming back for more.

If you enjoy a game of mindless shooting, destroying and killing from time to time, Alien Shooter 2 is perfect, even just to let some steam off a really bad day!

I'm recommending this especially to guys and gals who hate their working environment and their bad days are more than the good ones :)