[Review] Alien Breed Evolution

Technically, it’s title is Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1 which obviously indicates that there will be future installments.  However, it recently surfaced that Alien Breed Evolution was bought by just over 9,000 gamers.  The question on everyone’s mind is ‘Why so few?”.  I’ll gladly state that it wasn’t because the game is in anyway bad.

Alien Breed Evolution is a top-down shooter with an all too familiar premise.  Your spaceship collided with another spaceship and the oh-so opportunistic aliens felt that this would be a great time to attack.  The story isn’t going to win awards from the Writer’s Guild, but that doesn’t matter; we’re here to slay some aliens!

The first thing that you’ll probably notice is that the game looks a lot like the last 30 minutes of the Ridley Scott masterpiece, Alien.  Most of the game is very chaotic looking with more flashing lights than your Friday night rave, and enough fires to make Smokey the Bear change his line of work.  We’re at the point where if I’m ever on a spaceship overrun with aliens and it doesn’t look like this, I’m going to be severely disappointed.

The object of each chapter is to get to an elevator.  That’d be too easy though.  Of course, nearly everything along the way is broken in some way.  From here, the game requires a tedious amount of running across the map to make everything functional again while aliens pop out of everything they can to nibble on your tasty human flesh.  In order to minimize your damage taken, the radar will quickly become your best friend.  You’ll find that one of your eyes is constantly fixated on the upper-right hand corner.

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The game can either by played single player, or co-op over local or Xbox Live.  While this sounds common, both offer something very different.  Single player is more about a journey alone where each corner could be your last.  I seemed to play it very methodically and it felt a lot like a survival-(almost) horror title.  In comparison, the co-op has more of a shoot ‘em up vibe to it.  Lots of aliens popped up every ten feet, and you needed to rely on your teammate to ensure success.  The same gameplay mechanics were behind the two, but they almost felt like different games.

If anyone has any problems with Alien Breed Evolution, it’ll most likely be the relatively repetitive gameplay.  However, the game isn’t overly long, and it doesn’t hurt the title too much.  Unfortunately, it seems as though the survival genre often doesn’t have much more to contribute than ‘get from Point A to Point B, and don’t fall over dead on the way’.

At it’s core, Alien Breed Evolution is a pretty fun title.  It won’t win any XBLA Game of the Year awards, but it is definitely a contributor to a stellar year for Xbox Live Arcade.  Also working in it’s favor is that it’s only $10 (800 MS Points) as opposed to the emerging trend of $15 (1200 MS Points).  Ultimately, I think that Alien Breed Evolution’s poor sales can be chalked up mostly to the holiday season.  I think it may have released late enough that it missed most people’s radar in the holiday madness, which is unfortunate because a lot people missed out on a pretty solid title.