Alien blasting top-down shooter with countless horrors and game breaking bugs.

Story

The year is 2191 and the galaxy stands on the brink of war. Only the Inter-Planetary Corps maintain the uneasy peace throughout the dark galaxy. After a six month routine patrol around the Intex Network, crew members Johnson and Stone were ordered to check out a remote Space Research Center which had failed to transmit on any of the Federation wave bands.
Upon arriving at the research center, they sensed that something was wrong – there was an eerie silence shrouding the station. Little did they know that a violent alien organism had found home in it!

The Game

Alien Breed is an action packed survival horror science fiction shooter in which you play as a roughened marine fighting the rampaging aliens that have infested the Space Research Center. The game is played from a top-down view as you explore and shoot your way through each level of the station.
This is the first game in the series, and while its basic formula may not be groundbreaking, it does introduce a whole new level of sadistic difficulty not often seen in video games.
The premise is that you have limited resources and you’re fighting an endless alien infestation. The space station has lots of locked doors, so you have to search for keys in order to reach new areas. Running out of ammunition is a constant issue, because without ammunition you are totally defenseless. The goal of the game is to follow mission objectives, and those involve exploring the space station, shutting it down level by level by activating the self-destruct mechanism and eventually killing the mother alien.

Controls

The controls are easy to grasp, but in order to activate maps and toggle between weapons you’d need to use keyboard keys along with the controller. It’s also worth noting that you can’t sidestep or anything like that, which means that you constantly have to reposition yourself while taking aim at enemies. There’s also a risk of opening doors without the intention of doing so as merely walking near a door opens it, potentially wasting one of your keys.
All over the station, there are ramps – most of which make no logical sense, but they’re there nevertheless. These ramps have a considerable impact on how your character moves, potentially making it even harder to avoid all the aliens that are chasing you around. There’s also moving platforms, turbines and one-way access force fields that you have to overcome.

Content

Everything in this game pushes it toward being a panicked, stressed and hopeless gameplay experience. Alien Breed has six missions, and completing them requires a high level of precision and previous knowledge of the game. Each level of the space station is a labyrinth of locked doors, rooms and corridors going in all directions. Because there’s a limited number of keys that can be found, you really need to know which doors to open and which ones to leave untouched. The aliens are constantly respawning outside the edges of the screen, so you’re forced to kill extra aliens each time you backtrack to a previous location. Obviously you can’t afford to waste bullets like that, and if you make too many mistakes you’re either eaten by aliens, or left with no keys to proceed forward. In the latter case you have no option but to restart the game and try again. Needless to say, this is crude game design.

Other than collecting extra ammunition, health packs and keys, you’ll find money, or credits rather, lying around here and there. These can be used to buy weapons, keys, extra lives, ammunition etc at the Intex service computers that you’ll find scattered across the station. These same computers can also provide you with game statistics, maps and even a worthless Pong clone mini-game called Space Tennis.

There are six different weapons that you can buy, including flamethrowers, rocket launchers and laser guns. The standard machine gun is very weak, so you’ll definitely need to upgrade as soon as possible to stand a chance. Keeping aliens at bay is a key aspect, because they only need to touch you once in order to steal away a chunk of your health bar. Since the enemies are respawning, but none of your resources are, the situation quickly becomes unfavorable for you. The game is thus very unbalanced and basically, the only way to get around these issues is to know the game by heart.

The most common aliens will come in two basic forms – the bipedal gray slimy freaks and the bug-like six-legged ones. There are also a couple of alien bosses in there.
The enemy AI is very random. Some of the aliens will aggressively and mindlessly hound you while others will randomly stand around, or just minding their own business. They don’t typically have the ability to follow you around corners, so to some extent you can take advantage of that. But don’t count on outrunning them, because they’ll respawn right in front of you if you try.
Also the boss battles feel very rushed as the AI of the bosses is pretty much non-existing; they blindly walk back and forth and just beg to be shot at.

Alien Breed is definitely a game that you must fail at countless times before you can even think about beating it. You’re given four lives to beat the game, and with aliens swarming all over the place, death typically comes quickly. Once you’ve memorized which doors to open, which paths are worth taking and how to evacuate each level, the game can be beaten in an hour or two. But getting there will require tireless trial and error tactics and the analytical skills of a genius of some sort. It’s basically not worth it.
The game does not allow you to continue the game after that you’ve died, so in that case you must replay from square one, unless you’re using cheat codes.
But perhaps the biggest problem that you’ll face is the self-destruct feature mentioned above. Once activated, you’re given a mere 60 seconds to evacuate the level. Failing this, your game is over regardless of how many lives you had left.

As far as bugs and glitches are concerned, it happens every so often that your character gets stuck. The above mentioned fire doors are the biggest culprit here, but we’ve also seen that you can get stuck in walls, especially if there’s a sloping ramp there that can displace you into it. As if there wasn’t enough ways to get stuck in the game, there’s also this stupid glitch.
Having to replay the game from the very beginning just because you run out of keys, or become trapped behind a fire door, or get squished into a wall is, perhaps, not the end of the world if it happens rarely. But in Alien Breed these deadlocks are plentiful and hard to avoid, so it very much ruins what otherwise could have been a solid co-op action game.

Multiplayer

The game has support for two players to play cooperatively. This increases your chances for survival, as you’ll have twice the keys and twice the bullets at your disposal, but it also introduces an ugly glitch in the game. Both players must be on screen at all times, so you can’t leave each other behind. This is fine, but there are security fire doors all over the space station which can’t be opened once their lock mechanism is activated. If the two players are on either side of the door when a fire door shuts, you’re stuck there forever. Shooting the lock mechanism only requires one shot, and it’s easy to do by mistake while fending off waves of aliens. And the risk for this to happen only gets worse when you get more powerful weapons that have projectiles that bounce off of walls. Even if you are on the same side of the door when it shuts, it still can potentially trap you making it impossible to proceed in the game.
Aside from this game breaking bug, this game really is best when played in co-op.

Graphics

The graphics are quite detailed and the appropriate creepy alien space horror atmosphere is intact throughout the whole game. While the game comes off as gray and somewhat stale in the first few levels, some colors are mixed into it in the later levels. The mixture keeps the visual presentation interesting beyond what you see in the first few minutes of the game, and you’ll also keep encountering new elements in the levels as you go.
The animation is also good and gets the job done. All the weapons look good too, and seeing them in action is something that just can’t get old.

Sound

The game comes with an introduction disk that features the story line coupled with some pictures and a brilliant, unforgettable mood setting theme song. A big part of Alien Breed is about the dark creepy atmosphere of empty space and lurking horrors, and that feeling certainly is present here. You’ll see fluorescent tubes flicker along the corridors and computers hum and beep occasionally in the background. Aliens scream as they die from your wailing laser rifle and a female robotic voice denotes what zones you enter as well as your health- and ammo status. It all sounds pretty damn good actually.

Summary

Alien Breed has a lot of potential, but much of it goes untapped here. The basic concept is outstanding. Blasting ugly aliens in a desolate space station with limited resources has a strange appeal for sure, especially with a buddy on your side. But the game should not have been released in its current state as it locks you up in game breaking dead-end situations far too often. Even though the game is unforgettable with its creepy atmosphere and stressful gameplay you’ll most likely end up being disappointed with it. It’s just too cruel with its endless numbers of aliens, stupid glitches and unbalanced gameplay.

Developed By: Team 17
Published By: Team 17
Version Reviewed: Amiga 500
Genre: Shoot ’em Up / Survival Horror
Players: 1-2
Also Available On: Windows PC (DOS), Amiga CD32
Released: 1991