Alienation is a twin-stick shooter in which there are lots of aliens on Earth and you need to shoot them. I've played it for well over forty hours over the past few weeks.
The premise is simple. An alien race called Xenophytes, or Xenos, have all but destroyed humanity and taken over the Earth. Only you, a Captain in the UNX, are left. Actually, now that I think about it, it seems that way. There's the character you play as, a Major and a Colonel on your radio who tell you what to do and a helicopter pilot who picks you up when the mission ends. No other people. You take the fight to the Xenos by killing thousands of them in various locations and eventually destroy their ships, winning.
Now that the story is out of the way (I'll not condescend to you by telling you about the two guys who sold out humanity to the Xenos in exchange for immortality, which is apparently easy for the Xenos to do to others but not themselves), let's get down to the most important part of a game like this. I've put as many hours as I have into this because it's fun and satisfying. I'm not sure how to write this up without trying to mention everything at once, so I'll list them:
- There are three classes for you to play as - Saboteur, Tank and Bio-Specialist. Each has a different primary weapon and different active skills you can use in battle and recharge from eneny-dropped power-ups. Secondary and heavy weapons are the same across all three characters. Their movement varies slightly too, but each character is unique enough that you have to alter your playstyle for each. It mostly comes down to moving and shooting as quickly as you can, but there are obviously ways of doing this efficiently. When you get your weapons ranked up and upgraded to the extent you can just flatten entire waves of things you can't even recognise, it's great fun.
- Enemies range from big to small to toxic to teleporting to flamethrowing to shooting, and they're not unique to any location (aside from the first playthrough, I'll come to that) so you always face something different. There's little material difference in killing each different Xeno and the weapons only really operate on a pure firepower method than anything type-specific. Sometimes you'll get swamped and have to switch weapons or use a special ability, but this just gives you more firepower. And when you combine the classes...
- ... you get even more efficient at killing Xenos. You always have the option of playing missions on or offline, joining ones in progress or letting people join yours. With different classes working together you have more powerful and more enemies, but this just means more stuff on screen to explode with fancy colours. When you complete all the story missions for the first time you go from World Level 1 to 2, which allows for over-levelling and much more powerful enemies. This gives the game a bit of life purely beyond the story missions themselves, and has the added bonus of presenting tangible progression from continuing to play the game once the story is finished. Grouping up with other high level players is a big part of that, and even with limited chat options I had lots of good experiences playing online. Especially when I was about level 23 and someone who was 30/300 joined my game and I gamed about 20 levels because of him killing everything for me. There are also six different difficulty levels which scales enemies and loot accordingly, so it can be very easy to rack up big rewards.
I think that's all of the gameplay done in terms of the characters and weapons, so now the locations. The game takes place in five main areas, with four of these being constant maps. Here the game suffers slightly, as there are four main maps in total, but story objectives are focused on specific areas in the maps. You're still free to travel round the whole map though, so here the game can feel a little repetitive. It doesn't help that the structure, layout and aesthetic of each is quite similar, or at least becomes similar in the midst of combat. When you have lots of different enemies to shoot its fine, but the maps themselves aren't memorable at all.
On two occasions when plaything through the story though and in special missions afterwards you can play in UFO and Ark Ship missions, which are randomly generated alien ship layouts with random enemies. Again, great fun. Really satisfying when you're mowing down Xenos and when you're in a group of four fully levelled guys trying to get the rarest weapons and as much XP as possible. the game always features something engaging and challenging whenever you play. Furthermore on this point, when you play it features a weekly league table where your total XP gain goes up against other players. The ones who finish with the most at the end of the week go up a league and get a bonus XP level for the next round. Again, it's more incentive to keep playing, and keep scoring.
Aside from the maps, the only other problems I can think of seem like oversights more than anything else. Weapons drop from enemies and crates in-game, and it shows you the base power stats of it as you hover over it to pick it up, along with an arrow telling you if it's more or less powerful than what you've got equipped. As far as I can tell though this doesn't take into account any upgrades you've applied - which are again found in-game and improve your damage, clip size, fire rate and critical hit chance - which can make it annoying when you're trying to move through a level quickly. Both on and offline there's no pausing which complicates this further. You can bring up the menu, but the game still plays.
The menu is also really unintuitive. Despite my play time I never really got used to it. You use the shoulder buttons to move between menus and I struggled with going where I wanted to a lot of the time. It'd be nice if your health bar was always visible, rather than only showing up when you get hit. The in-game minimap is also a bit too mini, and hard to read quickly when you expand it. I also seemed to have a problem with the game crashing, which seemed to happen a lot after I'd finished a mission online with high level players. There's an autosave so there's nothing lost, but it still happened regularly enough to be concerning.
These are pretty much my only criticisms, which after the amount of time I've spent with it is nothing short of a miracle. It's a time-filler, but it's a satisfying one that's easy to pick up. It's paced well, it shoots well, and you never get bored. What more do you want?
(Side-note: After playing this I've also discovered what Diablo III actually is and am quite intrigued by it. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.)
