Alien Storm (Mega Drive Review)

 

I’m thinking of ways to reinvent the beat em up genre, I could replace the baseball bats with steel pipes?  No, I think that’s been done. What about changing the male protagonists for female?  Nope, that’s done too.  Some clever spark at Sega was clearly on another planet but changing the bad guys for aliens and weapons for lasers and cool stuff like that, has worked!  The best bit is, this feels like an arcade game, in your home!

 

 

You’ve got to saves the world from those pesky aliens I tells ya!  Well, they’re a little more than pesky, they’re utterly vile.  The 16-bit holds up well, the sprites are arcade quality, move and act as damn right nasty as you’d expect.  Some barf and fart on you like there’s no tomorrow, you really feel the need to “clean up the streets” as you dispatch a mammoth snail type thing using your council receptacle as a shell.  The heroes are well drawn and animated, the levels are lush and appropriate and lighting is used well.  Alien Storm is very nice to look at.

 

 

The sound is good, the whole arcade experience is intact.  Most importantly, the gameplay is spot on.  All characters’ attacks are short range, and you can string combos together Streets of Rage style.  In fact, it’s an awful lot like said classic.  The side-scrolling levels are interspersed with shoot-em up levels in shops (a la Operation Wolf) and flying shoot-em up stages which might as well have come out of R-Type.  It’s this invention that keeps you going, the normal action is all good and well but having only one dimension would mean that this game was over even sooner than it already is.

 

Yes folks, all good things must come to an end and Alien Storm is over in an hour.  I didn’t use a stopwatch but it was still daylight by the time I’d finished so I’ll assume that’s about right. Even ramping up the difficulty doesn’t seem to do anything.  There are added features, playing with a mate is good fun although it makes the game even easier! The vs mode is entertaining for a while but all in all there just isn’t enough game here.

 

Tis a shame because this game could have been a 16-bit classic.