Alien Breed for the Vita seems like a collection of various Alien Breed games when you boot it up. There were a bunch of different titles to choose from, so I just started from the beginning. When I finished that one I started the next title, expecting to see something new and fresh. What I was met with was something that looked exactly the same as the initial stages I’d just beaten. I had to shut off the game and restart just to make sure I hadn’t chosen the first title again; but I hadn’t. Alien Breed looks, plays, and is built in the exact same way in almost every single stage. The gameplay behind it could have been much more interesting in a more ambitious game, but right now it’s just a hollow diversion at best.
It’s an extremely faithful port of the Amiga version of Alien Breed from over twenty years ago, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. You’re tasked with various tasks on board spaceships, all of which are crawling with aliens. You’ve got twin stick shooter controls to get you through the hordes of creatures, but if you’re looking for something a bit more like the original version then there are a few more buttons you could push to shoot. I can’t imagine the person who would find the R button to be the most comfortable one to press, but it’s available to the player whose hand has been mangled into some sort of twisted claw via an industrial accident.
Firing at the aliens is pretty satisfying, although I found aiming was imprecise when I tried to use the buttons. The character on the screen shifts a little bit too much while moving around, making it hard to aim right at the aliens while running away from them. Given how often you’ll be backpedaling from your enemies, this makes it very hard to hit the ones that are chasing you. Using the second stick eliminates this problem entirely, so I really don’t recommend using the buttons. They might approximate the original game a little more faithfully, but I found using a button was frustrating.
You’ve got a lot of guns to use on the creatures, assuming you can afford them. Damage and the firing spread changes with each different gun, so there’s bound to be something that suits a preferred play style. I lean toward heavy damage and found a gun that would rapid-fire rockets, so I thought that would mean the end of changing weapons ever again. After a while I got bored using the thing, conveniently right around the time when I built up enough money to buy a brand new gun. That’s easily the most exciting part of the game, unfortunately, as the rest of the game is a dull, colorless chore.
I am sorry to the people who played and loved this game, but I absolutely don’t see the appeal of Alien Breed. For a game where all you do is shoot aliens while trying to reach certain locations, I would assume said locations would be interesting or that the aliens would be unique and compelling. I got neither of those items; and without decent music or plot I just don’t see why anyone would play this for more than a few minutes.
Once you start the game, take a good look around that location. That space ship sitting nearby is the closest thing to set decoration that exists in the game. The rest of the levels all consist of twisting gray or purple corridors occasionally broken up by a mass of black wiring. It’s very plain stuff, but I might not have felt it was a problem if every single stage across all of the game versions didn’t look this way. I don’t care if this is faithful to the original game; if you want me to pay you money for this game in 2013, you need to have some sort of variety in the levels. Changing the shape of the maze every time doesn’t cut it if the maze looks exactly the same. This is a simple game and needs variety to breathe life into it.
I thought the enemies could be a good source of interesting gameplay. Even if the hallways were boring, I wouldn’t care if I was too busy fleeing dangerous enemies. Well, there is the black alien that you’ll be fighting for ninety percent of the game, some little insect alien, and… that’s about it. The black aliens tend to show up in easily-dispatched waves; simply being shapes that you shoot at when they appear on screen. They don’t even really look like anything more than dark blobs on the Vita’s screen, and they’re just as far from interesting as can be. They don’t have any method of attack other than walking on top of you, so all you do when you see one is fire away. They don’t have much in the way of health either, so odds are good the creature will be dead before you even have to inconvenience yourself by slowing down.
The only times I took damage was when I didn’t notice the enemies coming for a number of reasons. The aliens don’t move especially quickly, but the player does; so I tended to just stumble into aliens if I was rushing into an area. Also, the symbol for your current gun at the bottom of the screen is so huge that it’s hard to see an alien walking up from there. The gun symbol is see-through, but the dark aliens blend in with it unless you’re really paying attention. Even more fun is when the player triggers a stage objective and starts a countdown, bathing the whole stage in deep red. The aliens are hard to make out beyond their movement at these points, so I took a lot of damage just because I didn’t see them coming. If you’re even slightly better alert than I am, odds are good you won’t be dying or even taking damage all that much.
Instant death could be trouble for some people, I guess. The game has a few pitfalls scattered around its gray hallways. They’re labeled with danger signs around them; so much like the aliens, their job is to catch someone who’s not paying much attention. Likewise, there are some laser barriers that can be turned on and off by shooting buttons, so you might accidentally activate one and cut yourself apart. Bosses also kill you in one hit, but considering they just stumble around the room and take up so much space that they’re impossible to miss, the only reason you’d die was if you underestimated how big your hit box was (like I did). Other than that, the game really isn’t all that challenging.
You can run out of items, though, so that could put a kink in your plans, right? Well, the game tends to leave a whole lot of stuff lying around its corridors, so odds are good you’ll find quite a bit of ammo while you stumble around looking for the level objective. Barring that, you can always open up a shop by pausing the game and buying what you need. If the game had put the shops in between stages or out of the way in the levels themselves then this could have made the game a bit more challenging, but instead I can just slip into a menu whenever I’m in trouble and buy ammo, keys, health, and lives. If you’re in trouble just hit that pause button and buy your way to victory.
If you’re not really looking for any kind of challenge, it’s a decent game. It controls well and there are a lot of different guns you can goof off with. Beyond that, there’s nothing else to this game beyond repetitive corridors and enemies. I just couldn’t think of a single reason why I would care to play the game long enough to buy another gun after getting the second one, as I’d really seen pretty much everything about the game in the first level. The offerings on hand for this game just aren’t varied or interesting enough to merit my time or money. There was more effort put into the first minute of Rad Raygun than went into every stage of this game, and I just can’t think of a decent reason to buy it beyond nostalgia for the old game. From the videos I saw on Youtube, the original looks better than this new version, so I can’t even really make that claim with a straight face.
