With Halloween just around the corner, Alien Breed Episode 2 may be about to get something of a sales spike as, admittedly, it may seem like the perfect game to play if you fancy staying in on this year's Hallows Eve. A top down shooter, set aboard a mysterious (and dark) alien vessel, you play as an Engineer known as Conrad, an unlucky guy who's ship's crashed into, and has become embedded in an alien vessel. With his only means of escape being to restart the engines aboard the alien ship, Conrad steps into the dark, and unforgiving corridors of an entirely alien world.
It's a tense, atmospheric game - but it's a shame it often ruins its own mood.
A horror game at heart, Alien Breed 2 is a game that plies its trade by creating an atmosphere of tension. By making everything as dank and dark as possible, with only a small torch lighting your way, you can never be sure what's lurking in the shadows, until it's right on top of you. As you clank your way through the spaceship, if you're a bit of a wuss like our news hound Sarah, you'll often find yourself spinning around using the right analogue stick, every time you think you might have seen something moving, or heard a noise, letting your torch cut a path through the darkness.
Alien Breed 2 takes its cues from Stanley Kubrick's Alien films, in terms of both the setting, and the enemies, who bear more than a passing resemblance to the black, insectoid creatures from the films. You've even got a motion sensor, which at least lets you pick up on a few enemies before they're right on top of you. More often than not, however, the enemies simply prefer to give you no warning whatsoever, and burst out of the ground behind you, without giving you any time to react - a practice that's sure to leave your trigger finger twitching.
It's disappointing, then, that although, at times, the game manages to create an atmosphere of tension, it simultaneously often manages to destroy it, by taking a number of cheap shortcuts that only leave a sour taste in your mouth. Although you can freely rotate the camera throughout the game, at times, the game decides, in its infinite wisdom, that it would be a great idea to lock the camera facing behind you - usually as you're walking down a narrow walkway. Taking away the ability to see what's coming towards you, and essentially meaning you have no choice but to keep walking into the unknown, we presume that this is meant to add to the tension - but it's such a cheap tactic, it just ends up being frustrating.
Similarly frustrating, there's a section early on in the game where, following an explosion, the entire screen starts to shake. And it just carries on. You'll find the screen keeps shaking for minutes on end, which not only makes it hard to play the game, but is also incredibly annoying, and practically headache inducing. It's like the game's doing its best to simulate what it'd be like trying play the game through a splitting headache, and it's about as much fun as that makes it sound.
At least we saw this one coming!
While there is a bit of a story going on in the background, it's rather poorly written, and as such, is nowhere near compelling enough to keep you playing - but that's not the biggest problem Alien Breed 2 suffers. While the game likes to pass you objectives, and hints as to where and what you've got to do next during conversations between your character, and an AI companion, there's no voiceover to read out the lines, with the game instead relying on you reading a small - and, more disappointingly, silent - stream of text that appears at the bottom of the screen. To do this, first, you've got to notice that there's text coming across the screen in the first place - even when it makes no sound to warn you that there's a message being displayed, and secondly, you've got to draw your attention away from the enemies that are attacking you for long enough to actually be able to read it, before it disappears. While this may have been a space, or cost cutting measure, it really affects the game, and makes the story that much harder to follow.
As you make your way around the ship, there's next to nothing in the way of puzzles, with the emphasis instead being placed on exploration of the decaying vessel, and, of course, combat with the enemies. To increase the tension, there's an incredibly limited amount of ammo lying around, even on the easiest difficulties, which leaves you actively trying to conserve your ammo. Thankfully, the easiest difficulties really do make the game a lot easier to play, which actually only helps to up the tension, as, because you take less damage, you're all the more likely to end up only just surviving, and wondering around for huge lengths of time with next to no life left.
However, it's somewhat disappointing that the single player story's only made up of a stingy five levels. And while they take around 40 minutes each to complete, it still leaves the game feeling somewhat too brief. The problem's only compounded by the fact that there are an extra four levels available in the game - but you can only play them if you're playing in co-op. Anyone who hasn't got a friend who's brave enough to join them (and doesn't want to join a random on Xbox Live) will effectively be missing out on almost half the game they've paid for, as there's no option to play along with a computer controlled ally.
The co-op mode. Presumably taken seconds before they were devoured by the aliens.
Not that they'll be missing out on much, of course. Without a real story tying them together, the co-op offering is a sadly disappointing prospect, which is completely ruined by the fact that you can't actually change the difficulty. By deciding to present novice players with a difficulty level they won't stand a chance against - regardless of who they're playing with - Alien Breed 2's co-op mode is effectively rendered worthless by one huge oversight. Even worse is the fact we managed to glitch it, with my co-op partner managing to fall off a bridge (that we still don't think you're meant to be able to fall off), and plummeting into the abyss, before, according to the game, dying about twenty times in a row - including seven in the space of as many seconds. Helpfully, the camera decided to follow him into the darkness below, rather than sticking with me, as I got ripped to shreds by an enemy I couldn't see, yet alone fight.
With a disappointing co-op campaign, and a brief, but average single player, it's hard to really recommend Alien Breed 2. What they really should have done is scrapped the separate co-op mode, spent the extra time developing another four levels for the single player, and added the ability to play through the story in co-op. With the ability to change difficulty added on, Alien Breed 2 would then have been a game that we could recommend. As it stands, it's hard to find reason to recommend this over any of the other numerous top down shooters on the Xbox Live Arcade, or even its own prequel - even with Halloween right around the corner.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
