Alien rage, a game about aliens raging. I wish I could stop there however that would be being very unprofessional and since summing up a game in a sentence would show that I probably didn’t put a lot of thought into this review and be insulting to the developers and publishers who did put a lot of work into an alright game. Alien Rage is an “old school” shooter released for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo DS and Wii (however the Nintendo version of the game is probably pretty different as the language and bloody confetti that occurs in standard shooters isn’t to family friendly for poor little Timmy and CO). It was also published and developed by City Interactive Games most known for making the ghost sniper series.
The story goes that you are standard tough guy marine with as much personality as and depth as a biscuit that has been left in the sun, the staple food of most common shooters. I feel I’m probably being a bit unkind as the guy does have some witty lines with his buddies on the radio which seem to have the EDI joker thing going on from the mass effect series. Any way you and generic marine dude who will now be known as Keith have to go and see what has happened on a mining facility that has some kind of mega energy source mineral thing were first contact was made with a peaceful race “cough” of aliens. Other than that if you just play the story normally then that’s as much as you will ever know as the main bulk of the story is told by the various audio logs scattered around like how I would like to scatter the pay check of the person who thought it was a brilliant idea to place the main/interesting part of the narrative of a storey in collectables. Keith does mention at the beginning that its probably a good idea to pick up the audio logs at the beginning however I feel this could have been easily resolved by making it clear that you gained something from it, I mean the PS3 and XBOX360 have a fancy thing called achievements/trophy and god knows how many games use this for irrelevant collectables. But then again this is an “old school “shooter; no one ever played doom because of its gripping narrative and complicated interesting characters.
As I said this is a good shooter as the enemies do have a fair amount of variation and I think the invisible shotguner/wolverine wannabe genuinely made me want to crush the controller in my hands with him popping in out of nowhere and showing me my lungs before I’ve taken a breath to cool down after slaughtering twenty of the frustrated scaly buggers. But this brings a massive issue to the game as you have noticed it’s an “old school” shooter and by this I mean that it is as much old school shooter as I am a professional gyncologist, sure iv dabbled in the area and had some success but I’m pretty sure I’m not an expert no matter how much I think after I’ve had a few. This because it falls into the trap of regenerative health and wall hugging and I found the most effective thing to do when things were getting rough would just be to tuck myself round a corner or crouched behind a box and have a brain splattering party as they ran at me one by one. There were also few instances where I would die and be warped a little forward in the game spending a good couple of minutes wondering where the hell I was and how I had gotten there like a go-fer waking up in then artic , utterly bemused. The game also has an interesting perk mechanic, as you gain points from pulling of kills of absolute skill( definitely not luck) then you get more points which allow you access to perks that make the game easier such as increase in health ,weapon damage and ammunition.
The game has a decent enough soundtrack , I wish I could say more about it but it really didn’t grab me however, I didn’t find it didn’t take anything away from the game and felt in sync with the game. Alien rage also was visual fidelity was good, as using the different types of weapons made rainbow of fun killings and as mentioned before the enemies did feel quite varied and different. The setting wasn’t massively varied, spending the majority of the game in facilities and ships but criticising that would be like saying cars should have no wheels and still work, it did a good job.
Overal Alien rage is a shooter, so you get what you expect from a shooter, a nice fun quick experience of pumping lots of led into lots of big scary angry aliens, my personal annoyance with the game is its advertisement to being an old school shooter, this is what it is not, maybe a hard-core shooter .Something similar to bullet storm. But it didn’t capture anything similar to games like doom or serious sam. If shooters are your thing and you like putting yourself through some relatively hard fights then you should give this game ago. Oh and I would love someone to actually tell me Keith’s actual name since finishing the game and spending far too long on the internet hasn’t given me any results but I guess for now, Bon voy-age.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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