Alien Shooter

Alien Shooter is an old friend of mine, I first played this bad boy back in 2006, when it was already 3 years old. Today there are 2 sequels and a Zombie Shooter clone, all of which can be bought on Steam as a pack for 14.99. A Top Down Third Person Shooter with little distinction and a great deal of fun, this one comes highly recommended. Being as how there is so little difference between these 4 titles I'll treat them as one entity.

Alien Shooter Survival Mode

I had some trouble playing the first Alien Shooter on Windows 8.1, even setting the compatibility mode to Windows XP didn't help, the game loaded, but the video flashed off and on, however Alien Shooter: Revisited worked perfectly once I set the compatibility mode, and, being that Alien Shooter and Alien Shooter: Revisited are basically the same game, I wasn't worried about getting the first one working.

Zombie Shooter: As Mythbusters has taught us, everything becomes more fun when a Minigun gets added.

The games are very simplistic in story, alien invasion at a secret facility, it's up to you to stop them, blah, blah, blah (even Zombie Shooter is actually an alien shooter). The campaigns are short, you can play through the entire campaign in under an hour, and there is almost no difficulty curve; shoot more aliens, make more money to buy better weapons and ammo, and look for secret areas for extra equipment and money. What I like about the game is, despite the predictability, the game keeps being fun, thanks to an easy and well made interface and an amazing balance that keeps your guns on par with the swarming enemies.

My favorite part of the game has always been the Survival mode, just you against ever increasing waves of aliens, killing them will drop upgrades and ammo, and it keeps going until you get overwhelmed. In a rare treat Alien Shooter: Revisited actually upgraded the survival mode to include a Turret mode. If you can't be kept happy endlessly shooting wave after wave of alien life, using bigger and bigger guns, leaving nothing but greasy smears on the ground then I pity the cold sterile childhood you were subjugated to.

I'm giving this one a 7/10, the fun won't last forever, but there's lots there while it lasts.

Alien Breed Trilogy

Alien Breed: Impact, Alien Breed 2: Assault, and Alien Breed 3: Descent were part of the Team 17 Jumbo Humble Bundle, one I picked up for a few bucks because it included other games I wanted, however it also got me the complete Alien Breed series. Steam terms this one an 'Action game' but it falls firmly in the '3rd Person Top Down Shooter' category. I initially tried the first one and wrote a review, however I have since played the other 2 and found one review for the group would suffice.

The game tells a bit of a story and I appreciate the form it takes, giving a comic book panel style display:

and, to be fair, the entire game feels like reading a comic book, gameplay and all, which CAN be a very good thing if done right. This one, however, isn't. At it's heart this is a standard space shooter, albeit a 3rd person shooter, not too far removed from the Alien series (no big surprise there). You roam through a space ship finding pieces to unlock progress (a key to open a door, etc.) encountering aliens you need to shoot as you go. That should all work, but, you ever notice how questing in a game is all good and fine until you come into a quest that sends you to Point A, then tells you you need to go to Point B, before sending you to Point C, then back to Point A to continue, turns out to be the most painful ones? Yeah, that sums up this whole game. It's an endless series of run and fetch quests:

OMG, there's a fire! Quick run back half way across the ship to activate fire suppression (shoot 3 aliens)! OH NO, the panel isn't powered, find the generator and fire it up (shoot 5 aliens, 2 of them really big)! Fire out? Good, lets go back to Point B to activate the console, then all the way back to that first door and find out why we need to backtrack again (Shoot 8 aliens, assorted sizes). Rinse and repeat until your eyes and ears bleed.

I want to play this game, I'm very curious about the story, I'm pretty sure I know how it'll end, but it's about the journey of getting there, and it is one of the better visually crafted games I've played in quite sometime:

Check out that kick ass fire!

If there was more craft in the progress I'd bump this up a lot higher and I do intend to try these again in the future, but, as of now, I think I'll have to give this one a 4/10 rating. Regular price each game is 9.99, however you can save some coin by buying the Trilogy at 22.99, if, and only if, you enjoy fetch quests.

Bottom line, I'd recommend giving this bad boy a pass.

Dungeon Hearts

I have no recollection of buying Dungeon Hearts so I have no anecdote to start this off with. It's defined by Steam as a Casual Game, but I would term it more as a Casual Puzzler. Long story short, it's a single player game that has 4 characters utilized as a team, their attacks based on you matching coloured tiles that run across the board (each character is assigned a skill set and colour, matching colours activates that characters attack), utilizing all the same cascading power up attacks we've come used to in puzzlers; match 3 red orbs to make a diamond that will make the fighter attack, which cascades horizontally and vertically to cascade all red orbs on screen, more diamonds mean more attack multipliers, etc, etc. Each player has a unique skill that gets powered up and can be used, blah, blah, blah.

I can see some appeal to this game, this style is very addictive, however in order to make a game really something you need to augment gameplay with story and character(s), and this game has almost none of either. The 4 team-mates have individual attacks, but no personality; the bad guys you fight are optically unique, but nothing in the story gives you a feel for what they are or even why you're fighting them. I'll say this for what I expect to be the first of many times: gameplay is only half of a game; you need a good mechanic, but people will forgive buggy mechanics if the story/characters are good (anyone else think Bethesda when I said that?).

The biggest problem I had with this game was the sluggish interface; at always seemed like my moves were about a quarter second behind the game, this kind of lag makes a major difference, especially when you get to the higher bosses where every half second makes a big difference. I should note, this may be due to my hardware, but I played the game on 2 different computers, both fairly beefy machines, and had the similar results (although I did have better performance on Windows 7 then 8.1).

I would rate this about a 6/10, there's fun to be had here but you may fight the interface more than the bad guys. Giving me a reason to either like or dislike the in-game characters would have seriously tipped the scales on this games rating, however the low, low regular price of 2.99 makes it hard to arbitrarily dismiss the game.

Playing My Game Library

Over the last few years I have accumulated quite a library of games, mostly in Steam, but for my assorted consoles as well.With the regular Steam sales and the incredible deals offered by the good people at Humble Bundle I suddenly realized I have close to 350 games between Steam and Origin alone; of the games I've probably only installed about a quarter of them, played maybe a half of those, and completed maybe 10%.

Now, to be fair, I have gotten almost all these games at incredible deals, most were purchased at 75% off, and many of them in the 80-90% off range, so, while my game value is massive my actual investment is not nearly as high; taking Humble Bundle purchases into account I likely paid half of what the calculator is estimating for the sale price. On top of that, games I paid full price for, or close to full price, were almost always played and completed so I'm not out a great deal of , but I'm still left feeling incomplete.

I have now set a new goal for myself, I'm going to play every game in my library, starting with Steam, moving to Origin, catching anything DRM free in my Humble Library, and then moving on to my consoles and do a write up on each one, posting them here. Most of these games are older so I don't plan on doing a review of them, just a run down on my thoughts and feelings about each title. My hope is to find some good ones that I never knew I had, but mainly to once and for all feel like I'm getting value out of my purchases, and, by writing down my experience, be able to make intelligent, informed, comments when ultimately asked "Is 'Insert Game Title' game any good?"

I have no idea how long this will take to complete, some of these games are huge, and, considering the scope of my project, I may or may not replay games I've already played through, I'll take those one at a time, but I'm intending to see this through to the bitter end!