Way less fun than it seemed at first glance.
This is a top-down shooter, but not a proper twin stick. Only 8 cardinal directions to move and shoot about, boo to that. But more importantly, it has a persistent map, but ephemeral enemies and basic ammo. What this means is that major powerups (such as flamethrower) do not respawn, while enemies are spawing around you at random, and despawning if you outrun them. So does ammo for your rifle.
This sounds challenging until you realize the game is secretly tuned to be
very easy. Here's how it works: you have a suit, that's your fairly flimsy Shield. You get it once at level start, and once it's broken, it's not coming back. Then you have your arousal bar, which is HP, but inverted. Zero arousal = full HP. Despite what the lewd animation implies, this metric is static; you can stay at 99% arousal for indefinite amount of time as long as you don't take additional hits. Once you reach 100% arousal (zero HP), you enter an orgasm state, where arousal will start rapidly rising on its own. When it reaches 999%, it's game over. It's essentially a timer for fainting. And here's the kick: during this state the game seems to always toss you a medikit that resets you to 75%. Additionally, any hits during this state don't really matter.
That's it. You're functionally invincible if you pick up those sedatives in time. Now add the fact that fighting basic enemies is literally pointless because they will despawn as soon as you run away and leave them off screen. This means you don't need to fight anything you can outrun, which is two most common enemy types. The game literally dupes you into believing any of its core mechanics are meaningful, therefore difficult. They're not.
So that leaves
navigating the map as the main challenge. See, this game does not show you a minimap by default. No, once you enter a new sector, you need to go to the minimap terminal and turn it on. How do you know where the terminal is? Well, you can look at the whole ship map for free while at the Bridge. Mind, the minimap is
also ephemeral. All the door unlocks are persistent, but minimap always resets to an "off" state once you leave any sector. IDK what was the supposed course of action for those of us without photographic memory... But I just took a screenshot and displayed it on my second monitor, like a sane person. This is such a clear failure of game design, that it can be used in a textbook. In a misguided attempt to make a cool
diegetic map, the game directly stimulated me to go
out of the game and make a crutch. Difficulty through obscurity, it does not work.
With core gameplay trivialized, and navigation cheesed, 99% of the suspense that is kind of mandatory for a Xenomorph-themed action is gone. Talk about genre and tone mismatch. And that's while visual assets are
really well done to sell that Alien movie vibe. Such a
waste.
As for the story... yeah, there's basically none. You rescue some NPC's that you, the player, had never met and will never meet again, and all you get is a short and very dry snippet from their dossier, and 3-5 looping frames as your... animation reward. They are all mindbroken anyway. The actual movie, Alien, is 95% about the crew of Nostromo. Here, the crew is just 8 pieces of senseless meat you pick up from the floor and shove into a freezer. Literally stick into the freezer, figuratively pick up, as they don't even get to have their character sprites.
Overall, I was not impressed.
