Indie Review: Alien Hallway

Alien Shooter is a game that aims to introduce some strategic depth while keeping everything else to a minimum, including the actual quality of the game itself unfortunately

• Name: Alien Hallway
• Genre: Strategic Action (if that exists)
• Players: One
• Multiplayer: Nope, because then the game might be fun and we wouldn't want that
• Platforms: PC
• Developer: Sigma Team
• Publisher: Sigma Team
• Price: $9.99
• Reviewed On: PC

In all of my articles and reviews, I always seem to give my life story and of what amounts to about 10 and a half pages of background before talking about the game or making my point. This time, and thanks to the Alien Hallway being extremely demotivating, I’m going to jump straight into it; I’m not really in the mood to chat. So, and in my personal opinion, Alien Hallway is mediocre at best. I’d like to end it there, I’d like to tell you not to buy it and instead do something more enjoyable like sawing off your arm. This being eGamer though, a site that encourages its reviewers to give even the bad games more than a turd tossing and subsequent conclusion, I have to write more. So, my unbiased hat on, let’s do this.

Look, in all honesty, Alien Hallway isn’t that bad, it’s more or less just some game. Its problem is that it’s so mediocre that it’s void of any character that it might have had as a bad game; something we could laugh about, get angry over together and have rave to each other about about. Instead, Alien Hallway will fade into oblivion, where it should remain. Alien Hallway just does everything wrong. It looks dated, cheap and void of any real effort. It’s not that ugly but again, it just looks so plain and unappealing that it’s hard to find a reason to even bother watching the screen as I play. The music and sound effects don’t help either; they’re so meaningless you might as well turn them off because you’ll hardly notice their presence. The only thing the aesthetics of Alien Hallway do is make this game more difficult to play. That’s mostly because you now have to block your eyes as well as ears as you play the game. I suppose mute and the monitor off will suffice.

My second problem with Alien Hallway is the gameplay. The game involves an enemy base that spawns waves of aliens that run in your direction on a mission to destroy your base. Your only defence is to build soldiers that run at the enemy’s base; fighting through and defeating the alien waves as they approach your enemy’s base. It’s sort of like Pax Britannica (another, yet much better, indie game) where you do not control your units but rather their construction and they do the work for you. It’s supposed to be strategic and allow for varying amounts of each unit, that balance out and work together to defeat the enemy. As you will soon realise though is that Alien Hallway is devoid of any real balance and it leaves the one last hope for the game dead in a. The problem is that all you need do is spam whatever the strongest unit you have is; that is until you get the grenadier whereby you just spam that. You can literally close your eyes and click the build grenadier button until you win. Maybe that’s why the graphics is so mediocre, because you don’t need any visuals to play the game. The other aspect of gameplay is choosing upgrades after each round with which you can affect your units and other details within each round. This could have been a somewhat redeeming factor for the strategic side of things. Unfortunately, and as seems to be the case with just about everything in this game, most of the upgrades are pointless and just upgrading your grenadiers damage and unit build time is all you need to make your grenadier spam effectively unbeatable. There is also an artillery strike you can call in but it’s weak and never really gives any reason to upgrade it.

What makes this game so much worse is that Sigma Team, the developers of Alien Hallway, are also responsible for creating Alien Shooter 1 & 2 and Zombie Shooter 1 & 2; two series that are a whole load of fun and that kept me entertained for hours when I first played them. I’m not sure what inspired, or rather where the lack of inspiration came from when Sigma Team made Alien Hallway. When compared to their previous games it feels like one gay made it in his basement while bored and sleep deprived. Really, there are so many other games I’d recommend; I’d even go so far as to recommend rubbish like Superman 64. At least then there’d be some entertainment in the frustration of the game. In fact, rather than playing Alien Hallway, play Alien Shooter. Unless you’re hugely into something as brain numbing as clicking on what should be a blank screen, avoid this game.

Name: Timothy Biggar
Location: Durban
Position: Previous Author

Timothy has published 89 posts. Read all of Timothy's posts.

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