PixlBit

Franchise necromancer, Team 17, is back and they want you to play their latest reiteration of a game they already made in the '90s. Alien Breed 2: Assault is a semi-fixed camera shooter that doesn’t try to do anything fancy and stays painfully true to the original Amiga classic. Like most in Team 17’s library, it’s a value priced game with equally low production that tries to do exactly what the game before it did with just a couple new features added on, primarily, Survival Mode.

For gameplay, the camera style in this game quickly presents its flaws by rotating around the character for what should have undoubtedly been an isometric shooter. It feels like a top-down shooter stuck in a third person’s body, and the gameplay suffers horribly from it. Enemies popping out from behind the camera are a major problem as is the lack of ability to see around corners. Add all of this onto the fact that the camera is way too close to the character when looking down, and you've got yourself some seriously confusing design decisions.

Probably the most interesting failing in the design of this game is how unsatisfying the shooting mechanics are. Bullets seem to just fly right over or go through enemy aliens with the only indication of damage being the tiniest spurt of green blood, followed by a robotic death animation that appears as if it was sped up to be five times fast. Anyone who’s curb-stomped the head off a grunt in Gears of War, or exploded a super mutant in Fallout 3 can tell you the satisfaction of good chunky death feedback in a shooter. While I don’t usually like to bash a title for art execution, this game could benefit greatly from investing in a few decent particle effects. It seems that Team 17 simply missed the bus on this rather basic game mechanic, and the core experience suffers quite a bit from it.

The level design in Alien Breed 2 is pretty passable when the camera angle allows it. Credit and ammo pick-ups are abundant throughout the derelict spacecraft. Also, lots of switches are around that usually trigger some sort of cutscene involving the ship’s machinery activating. Enemy spawning is annoyingly unpredictable, and aliens will constantly trickle out sometimes one at a time, with very little variety in the types of aliens spawned. This happens so often, in fact, that I honestly can’t decide whether this game was supposed to be a survival shooter in the vein of Dead Space, or a run-and-gun shooter that the original game in the series was known for.

Boss fights are as lackluster as they are boring. Random projectiles routinely surprise the player with no explanation to their origin or follow an even more frustrating habit of having unavoidable splash damage. Luckily, the bosses are extremely easy and have the universal objective of simply shooting at the closest thing you can see. It really requires little to no effort on the player’s part as long as you have a med pack or two.

Altogether, Alien Breed 2: Assault does nothing more than you’d expect from a budget game. It’s an out-of-the-box, Unreal Engine shooter with not much else put into it other than the possible exception of the level design. Even for a budget title, however, it’s still a bit concerning that a team as experienced as Team 17 can make design choices that are so amateurishly executed. For the shooter fan that has to play anything with a targeting reticule, this game might be worth a play. Everyone else can just play Valve’s Alien Swarm on Steam - for free.