I have to admit I had pretty high hopes for Alien Rage from what I'd seen. It looked like a fun little $20 arcadey shooter with some truly gorgeous visuals. The whole space marine scene doesn't grab me all that much, and I certainly think it gets pretty regularly milked, but it looked pretty good. Sadly, I was wrong. The visuals are certainly gorgeous, at least, but some confused combat that quickly grows surprisingly tiresome and a sheer lack of variety amount to a pretty disappointing title.
The opening cinematic sets up a generic but potentially
interesting story: the humans are fighting generic alien race for control of
the Universe’s super magic energy source. It’s your standard space marine
affair and certainly nothing special, but there’s plenty of room for them to
expand it into something far more interesting. Unfortunately, as the game
rattles on at its turbulent pace, you begin to realise that the opening
cinematic is nothing more than a weak set up for you to kill an entire race of
generic aliens. It’s almost as if they pretty much scrapped the story as soon
you get into the actual gameplay, the only reason you seem to have for doing
anything is simply to make progress. Which isn't a total disaster, I guess, I wasn't exactly expecting a gripping narrative but I was a little disappointed
after the opening cinematic to find that the story goes absolutely no where.
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| All of the game's issues aside, the game looks pretty gorgeous |
The gameplay couldn't be any more basic: you move through a
series of tight corridors and small rooms killing everything that moves,
stopping only to press some random button or go down an elevator. Well, okay, it’s an FPS, what did you
expect? I hear you say. Don’t get me wrong, I love FPS's and my problem is
not with the repetitive nature of monotonously killing endless aliens, which I did
found far more tiresome than I normally would. I don’t know whether it was the
sheer lack of variety or maybe it was just the depressingly dull colour palette
of grey and more grey that had me feeling so bored so quickly, but I was bored
to tears 20 minutes in. Enemy variety is severely lacking and may as well be categorized into those who run at you and those who don’t. Weapon variety isn't all that bad,
with the usual assault rifle, SMG, sniper, pistol and then the alien equivalent
of each, but I wish the game had taken advantage of its futuristic setting to
get at least a little creative with
some of its weapons rather than just recycle weapons that already exist in every video game ever made.
Most of the weapons feel pretty decent, with the exception
of the alien shotgun/railgun that has the kickback of a raging bull and is damn
near impossible to use without getting extremely close to the enemy, which they
make almost impossible to do without dying. I found that most of the guns
sounded pretty weak often sounding more like pea-shooters than powerful rifles,
and they felt pretty weak too. The game’s idea of making the game difficult is
just to make you extremely squishy and make all the aliens spongy as hell in an
attempt to emulate a challenging game. I found that your pathetic survivability
really messed with the game’s pacing, since the game is full of high-octane
action and things consistently exploding, and generally appears to want to be a
pretty fast-paced game. However, your low health pool has you running away to
recover health and cowering behind cover every five minutes, which dramatically
stunts both your progress and the flow of combat. Whilst the small section of
the game where you aren’t in combat emits a real sense of oh shit, you better run because you don’t want to get caught in that
explosion or something to that effect. I don’t know what they were trying
to do here but what comes across is some confused combat with really some
flawed pacing.
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| I don't know what everyone is so mad about but this guy seems pretty pissed |
One of my main problems I have with Alien Rage is that it’s
so confused about what it wants to be. The game will feel familiar to anyone
who has played Bulletstorm with similar
weapon designs and a scoring system that grants you a bonus for scoring a
headshot or explosion kills. The scoring system and the game’s goofy tone give
you the impression that the game wants to be an arcadey shooter that requires
methodical cover-based shooting. However, the game’s habit of throwing melee
enemies who just run and stun you kind of screws with the whole methodical
shooter concept. It makes it seem as though Alien Rage is trying to more like Painkiller or Hard Reset than Bulletstorm,
which it most certainly isn’t. I found it quite frustrating when the game tried
to balance the careful cover-based gameplay with crazy close-range mayhem
because when it focused on just one at a time they worked pretty well. The
scoring system also feels a little unnecessary, almost as if they included a
scoring system, with a knock-off Unreal
guy shouting “DOUBLE KILL” “MEGA KILL” and “HEADSHOT” every five minutes, into
a pretty dull shooter to make it seem like you’re having more fun than you are.
Okay, okay enough shitting on the game. Maybe I am being a little unfair here. All the problems I
have with Alien Rage aside, the game is still a competent shooter with a goofy
tone and some beautiful visual design. The gameplay might have its flaws but it’s
still quite fun and it will certainly appeal to some people. Although the guns
sound pretty weak, some decent voice acting and generally good sound design
make up for it. There’s also a multiplayer mode which isn’t anything special,
your usual blend of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but it’s a reasonably
competent multiplayer mode. At the end of each level you are given your overall
score, which you go back and try to beat as much as you want, so there
certainly is some replayability if that’s what you’re into. Overall, I would
have enjoyed Alien Rage a whole lot more if it had just sussed out what kind of
shooter it wanted to be instead of trying to dabble into a little bit of
everything. Oh, and insert cringe-worthy pun about how the game put me into an “alien
rage”.
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