Welcome to space. Aliens live here. Angry ones.
That’s the premise behind Team 17′s new top-down shooter for the Xbox 360, a remake of the original Alien Breed for the Amiga, Alien Breed Evolution.
The game has gotten a new coat of paint and a new set of wheels, so to speak. The graphics and musical score have been updated for the Xbox 360, and the controls rely on both analog sticks for movement and aiming. Movement is done with the left analog stick, while aiming in any direction is done with the right analog stick.
In this game, characters take the role of Conrad, lead engineer on the spaceship Leopold, which has crashed into another unknown, hostile-packed spaceship. Conrad and his intel-savvy assistant, of whom the game doesn’t really mention of a name, must stop the aliens before the Leopold is sucked into the neighboring planet’s atmosphere and similarly, destroyed.
Gameplay is divided into 5 hour-long chapters, each with the same routine throughout the game. Find objective/switch, put out fires to get to said switch, operate a few consoles in which aliens ambush you when you do so, repeat. The aliens in this game come in a variety of sizes and shapes, most annoying being the spitters which can inflict decent damage from a far range.
But Conrad is not limited in his capability of defending himself. Along the way he finds assault rifles, shotguns, your trusty pistol (which never runs out of ammo), a flamethrower, and others. You can find ammo just laying around, in lockers, and from other dead humans on-board the ship. You can loot from either lockers or dead humans and obtain secondary or ammo items like grenades, bullets, and health packs, among others.
The game also offers a hectic 2-player mode in which players can tackle the Assault mode with a friend either locally or online via XBox Live. Assault is different form the story mode in which you and your partner shoot aliens. That’s simply the entire mode. Aliens will come at you from all sides, in waves, and it’s up to the both of you to stay alive. If you or your partner happens to die, you have a 10-second respawn timer to contend with before getting thrown headfirst back into the action.
Either way you put it, Alien Breed Evolution offers a fast-paced action-packed nostalgic ride through what is one of the better choices on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s well worth the price of admission, being around 5 hours long and only on XBL arcade. Team 17 has done a fine job of recreating the original Alien Breed and we hope to see where the other 2 episodes go from here.
