Fun and easy to play pinball with grotesque aliens, blood and guts.

Story

Decades after the first explorations into space, humans return to once again explore distant planets. One day in planet Jupiter’s orbit, a huge unknown space ship is encountered. The defense force respond to the unknown ship by sending in soldiers to investigate. They soon find that the ship is infested by an alien life force, and they become trapped in there. To escape they now need to locate the alien mother and eliminate it.

The Game

Alien Crush Returns is a 3D pinball game that takes place on three different alien themed boards. The boards are gloomy and include some disturbing imagery as they depict the entrails of some unknown life form, crawling with maggots and weird alien parasites.
This is a sequel to the original Alien Crush and the two have many similarities. Aliens crawl around on the board and when you hit them with the ball you score points, and there’s a bonus room in which you must hit as many aliens as possible. Like other pinball games, the general goal is to collect the highest score possible.

Content

Alien Crush Returns has many features in common with other pinball games – there’s score multipliers, extra balls and lots of opportunities for bonus points. What’s new here though, is a feature called Actions and the Story mode that sits on top of the more traditional Arcade mode.

The story mode starts you off at the first board and tells you that your objective is to hit the marked aliens. When you’ve hit them all, you complete the stage and move on the next. All in all, the story mode consists of three different stages and two bosses, and the objective is the same on each stage – hit the marked aliens. It is clear that the focus in this game isn’t the Story mode as it can be beaten in just a matter of minutes, depending on your luck and skill.

The three boards play differently as they all have their unique features, but they also have similarities. All boards have the same bonus room – what sets them apart is the types of aliens you encounter there. The other similarity between the boards are that they don’t really offer that much for you to do. There’s only a few sets of triggers you can hit and once in a while you gain the Rate Up bonus, which gives you extra points for hitting targets within a set time.

As mentioned, Actions is a new feature to the series and these are special effects that you can trigger with the press of a button. These are;

• Speed Boost which gives the ball a powerful thrust in its current direction.
• Reverse Ball which reverses the movement direction of the ball. This is incredibly useful if you see that the ball is headed towards a place you don’t want it to go, for example down a drain.
• Split Ball which gives you temporary multiball.

These Actions can be activated every 20 seconds or so, so they certainly play a huge role in how the game plays. They provide more than one way to save you from losing a ball, so learning to use them is key. As such, Actions are very powerful and using them almost feels like cheating. This feature certainly gives the game a distinct feel that makes it unique among other pinball games.

The Arcade mode lets you play any of the three boards and here your objective is simply to score as many points as possible. Your score can be posted to the worldwide score table, and you can compare it with other people. This is an awesome feature that gives the game a lot of replay value. Each score board entry hold two values of interest – the point score and the time it took to obtain that score.
Arcade mode allows for some really marathon type games where your endurance is put to the test. Our top scoring games have been very long, but also very satisfying.

One big disappointment with the game is that you can only save one player profile, which in turn means that only one profile can enter the score boards. Thus, the local scoreboards can’t really be used to compare scores with friends and family using the same machine, since every score entry is automatically entered with a single preset profile name. Would a name entry feature have been too much to ask for? I understand why this would be the case for the online leaderboards, but in my opinion they shouldn’t sacrifice the local scoreboards for online leaderboards.

Multiplayer

Alien Crush Returns also features Versus mode, which lets you play against three other players over the Wi-Fi connection. There doesn’t seem to be many active players available there though, so match making takes a long while.
When it comes to online competition it seems that the online leaderboards is the better bet.

Controls

The controls are as easy as a real flipper game. You need to have a Nunchuk controller connected in order to be able to control both flippers. The ball behaves faithfully most of the time, which is an upgrade from the previous Alien Crush game. The camera seamlessly follows the ball as it travels from the upper section to the lower, or vise versa. With some training you’ll be able to pull off some insane stunts with the table tilting function, too. Tilting the board is done by shaking the Wii Remote, and it works surprisingly well. The Wii Remote’s vibration effect also nudges away in the palm of your hand every time the ball hits something on the board, and as you hit multiple targets in succession the vibration is constant, and thus quickly loses its novelty.

Graphics

The graphics are very nice over all. The boards are designed to look organic and the whole game maintains a gloomy and disturbing atmosphere. The game has a very wicked design with all its alien spines, bladders, blood veins, guts, eyeballs, slime, and writhing organic matter. You’ll also have the pleasure to watch green alien blood fizzle and evaporate as that’s what the aliens you kill consist of. It all looks kind of disgusting but at the same time it’s hard to take your eyes from it.

Sound

The soundtrack consists of some trance-like beats and other pulsating rhythms. The music works well with the dark sci-fi alien theme, and it lets you focus on the game. The sound effects are well done and fits the theme perfectly too – some of it sounds like it’s straight from a horror movie.

Summary

Alien Crush Returns is a fun little pinball game that’s a blast to play. It has lots of replay value if you’re into playing for the high scores. One could argue that the boards in general could offer some more things to do than just the occasional multiball and Rate Up bonuses. However, the excitement that arises when you’re close to beating the high score is just intense and if you’re into pinball video games this is definitely worth checking out.

Developed By: Tamsoft
Published By: Hudson Soft
Version Reviewed: Wii
Genre: Pinball
Players: 1-4 (online multiplayer)
Released: 2008-11-07