Alien Shooter 2 - Conscription, Completed

Alien Shooter 2 is a not very well known birds-view FPS that I'd like to make a bit more known. The reason? It's a really good game!

No doubt there are a lot of good games out there, probably with a much better storyline than this one too. Actually the storyline is probably the only thing that's lacking, other than filler and unenertaining gameplay. You'll notice a bunch of grammatical errors, especially at the end of the game, when people say things like "I will revenge myself upon his death. Follow me!" and at the end of the game ... eh ... well I probably shouldn't reveal the ending already. ;) It's just a 'mistery' that they didn't use spell-check before publishing the game. Typos and grammatical errors aside, the gameplay is intense, the enemies are numerous (at the beginning many new enemies for each level), the weapons number around a hundred and the rewards and upgrades are everywhere.

The game consists of 10 missions, and for each mission the hordes of enemies increase drastically. So does your firepower, however, and you can always buy new weapons (and other neat things) at the shop with cash you've picked up if you can't find the weapon pickups across the different levels. You gain EXP all through the game, and with that you gain skill points for every "level" you move up, which you can use to increase health, speed, strength, etc. The rewards system is great, the scenery is varied if you like shooting stuff then there's plenty to shoot at, don't forget the explosive barrels and crates too!

Though the levels may be aggravating at times and cause you quite a few reruns, the game is overall pretty short. It's not a bad thing, it's just the right length IMHO, never gets boring, never gets too interesting. It's a game you can play through in a day ... if you really play the whole day, or just spend an hour on a mission every now and then. There are also three extra mini-modes you can waste time on: Career, Gun Stand & Firm Stand (I think, that last title sounds a little off). in Career you start off with small monsters and a small gun and fight your way towards more and more powerful enemies. I don't know if you can win in this mode, I didn't get very far, I ran out of bullets and there didn't seem to be any more ammunition lying around.

In Gun Stand you play the roll of a stationary gun within a concrete ring plowing down the monsters on all sides, like a mini-version of a Tower Defense game. When the timer runs out all remaining enemies blow up, so keep them from breaking in until then! In Firm Stand you have a weapon and unlimited ammo, and after killing some little aliens a bigger alien comes along. Kill the bigger alien and you'll get a bigger gun, and move along to killing bigger aliens. The last two modes are both high-score modes, there's probably no "congratulations, you won!" screen at the end, though I can't say for sure, but they're both nice time-waster modes.

Overall it's a game I recommend, lots of action, lots of variation, good sound, good scenery. The controls may seem a bit stiff, and they are, but they're not stiffer than you can get used to, and there's plenty of items to make up for the lack of control. I tried taking screenshots, but they all appeared black during gameplay. Note, this is not how the game looks, it is only how the screenshots look. :P

Taking screenshots of the score at the end of the game seemed to work fine though ... maybe it has something to do with Direct X? The static screenshots (not dynamic, ie without any movement in them) all work fine. So, I gladly present you with my first highscore, see if you can beat it on a first run. ;)

And the finishing message ...

Theres also a little 'outro' at the end of the game, but I'll leave that as a surprise. Also, just so you get a glimpse of how the "real game" looks, here's a screencap I fetched from Google:

Yes, you get to drive a little machine-gun-wielding-automobile at one point in the game. You get to control a stationary gun too at another. And you get lots of points with these guns! ;) You get to ride in a helicopter too, but that's beyond the cutscenes.