Hello and welcome to the first of what I hope is more to come.
Since this is my first “professional” review, hope fully your be gentle with your criticisms.
Anyways, I was given the opportunity to review a copy of Team 17’s “Alien Breed 3” for the Steam Game service. This is my first experience in this universe and it was an interesting time. The Alien Breed series has been around since 1993 with the launch of the original game on the Commodore Amiga. With game-play that harkens back to the golden age of Arcades, the series strikes a familiar and welcome note. While I might not be familiar with this franchise I am familiar with Team 17’s work on the Worms series.
Check your suit seals and weapon safeties. Hit the jump to cycle the ‘lock.
From the Steam game page description: “Alien Breed™ 3: Descent is the final explosive chapter in the Alien Breed™ series, and is a science fiction arcade-shooter with an epic story, swarms of highly intelligent alien enemies, high-impact weapons and stunning environments, developed using Epic Games’ Unreal® Engine 3. Descend into hell and once again take control of the hero, Conrad, the ship’s Chief Engineer, in his last stand against the savage alien horde. While the doomed vessel, the Leopold, and the alien space craft plunge deeper into the planet’s atmosphere, with an icy ocean promising a watery grave, you have just hours to defy a grisly death and survive the alien onslaught for the final time. As you struggle deeper into the sinking alien ship, through the freezing waters flooding every corridor, the horrifying truth surrounding the existence of the Breed is finally uncovered… In addition to the thrilling conclusion to the single-player campaign and the relentless and competitive “Survivor” modes, the game offers action-packed, two-player online co-operative battle modes.”
Now with that bit of marking speak out of the way, this is an interesting game. The game is styled in a classic 3rd person, top down perspective game play. Because of this I experienced some difficulties, but as my computer test rig isn’t a dedicated games platform those difficulties were my fault not the game’s. Once I turned down the settings the game-play became a lot smoother. Again, not a fault of the game. As I alluded to, the game-play is very similar to classic arcade games like Gauntlet. While this might not be new or revolutionary, it suits the overall game feel. The player character, “Conrad”, is trapped in a confining maze-like environment. This environment did cause me some minor movement issues. I was using a mouse and keyboard control scheme. That issue was mainly getting temporarily stuck on the game scenery, but it’s more of an issue with the “linkage” between mouse and keyboard. Game pad control are supported but I was unable to test that setup, again not an issue with the game.
While I played the game on the middle of the three difficult settings, the enemies I encountered were not overly difficult to conquer. You have the option of using five different weapons but at the end of my time with the game I had only acquired a total of three (default “pistol”, assault rifle, and flamethrower).I found that most enemies could be beaten using the assault rifle only. The game uses what I call a modified “monster closet” system. The smallest of the enemies use a fixed “generator”, which can be destroyed. The larger creatures tend to “spawn” out of the deck-plates. In all cases, once they’ve spawned the generators stop. There are several “swarm” areas in the game. These are points where the game will throw a large amount of the larger enemies at you. If you have aquired enough game credits, your able to use “sentry guns” to help defend at these points.
Now that I’ve mentioned the use of game credits, I’ll talk about the games pick-up system. During the course of the game, you have the opportunity to search lockers and human corpses for credits, weapon ammo, and items. These items are the classic item you would expect from a game like this (i.e. large and small heath packs, lethal and non-lethal grenades). These items could be also bought from the Intex Computer terminals. These terminals also act as a save point mechanism for the game as well as a character/weapon upgrade station. Now this might be a case of linkage between the previous two games in the series, but I found that I never really had enough game credits for either character or weapon upgrades.
While this review is primarily focused on the single player, this isn’t only game mode available. Within the single player there are a total of three modes (Story, Survival, and Free play) to choose from. A multi-player (Co-op Assault) is also available. I was unable to test these modes to to time constraints.
So what’s the bottom line? This is a very serviceable game. It is compact enough for a quick jump in/jump out game-play. You can play for a hour or two, set it aside for more important or pressing RW issues, and restart later. I don’t use number grading systems for reviews, they are to easy to be misconstrued or overly complicated. I use a simple A-F grading scale (just like school). Based on my experience of this game, It rates a B+. This is an enjoyable game that isn’t overly complicated that’s filled with a lot of classic game-play.
That’s my take…What’s yours?
