Alien Shooter: Vengeance Review

Alien Shooter Vengeance pretty much sums up its gameplay in its title; you shoot aliens, and lots of them. The game is a bit of a throwback in that it has a 90s three-quarters top-down view perspective on the strictly 2D action. The game itself is even a mix of 90s style action-RPG gameplay melded with elements of turn-based tactical strategy games – think Diablo meets Fallout Tactics and you’ll get the picture. Unfortunately Alien Shooter can’t quite capture the gaming magic that made those 90s classics so much fun to play and so it ends up feeling like a game out of its place and time.

In Alien Shooter you begin play by selecting a mercenary from a list of pre-made characters. Each is a little different in terms of their skills which affect things such as their weapon proficiencies, sight range, and experience rate. It’s basically a stat and perk system that lets you choose a character that fits your style of play and determines your character’s progression through the game. Unfortunately there’s only one real style of play in the game so your choices won’t make your gameplay experience different in any measurable way, but more on that later.

Once you have your character picked out and you’ve spent your extra stat points, you’re dropped outside of a research base that is experiencing a slight problem of alien infestation (why do aliens love ransacking research stations so much?). Your job is to get into the base, locate any survivors, and shoot the bejesus out of anything and everything else.

The game’s core feature is the wanton slaughter of aliens, but unfortunately this is also the area in which the game falls completely flat. You’ll be attacked throughout the game by mobs of aliens – veritable hordes so thick that they have to walk over each other just to get to you. This sounds like it could generate some excitement but in reality all that you do is stand around holding the fire (mouse) button down as you empty your weapons into the mass of alien bodies, move to the next spot you’re mobbed, and then start the shooting all over again. To its credit the game does have an extensive list of weapons available, but the experience is not that much different between standing in one place emptying a machine gun into a mass of alien bodies and standing in one place emptying a grenade launcher into a mass of alien bodies. The game also has a nice menagerie of slimy aliens to throw at you, but they all do the same thing: make a beeline straight for you. The aliens are essentially all the same type of critter. You won’t even be able to discern between them very often as they come at you in such numbers that they all meld into an amorphous blob. It all becomes pretty tiresome before too long and there’s nothing else engaging enough here to keep you playing beyond that point.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 64%. Alien Shooter Vengeance manages to make the whole scale slaughter of thousands of vicious aliens tedious and repetitive.