Alien Hominid

A highly stylized 2D shooter slightly tarnished by control and AI issues.

Can a game originally intended to run on Macromedia Flash hold its own as a full-length console title? Alien Hominid attempts to answer that by breaking thru preconceived boundaries and showing that solid concepts work well in any form. Don't expect Hominid to be a straight port of the Flash game, the graphics, sound, and game engine have been totally revamped for its console inception.

Old school side-scrolling shooters will always be a corner stone of the gaming market and Alien Hominid takes the classic shooter style of Metal Slug and meshes it with hand drawn wacky graphics reminiscent of Lilo & Stitch character designs. The FBI ambushes our titular hero, Alien Hominid, while passing through our solar system and its spacecraft has been confiscated. Players must help defeat the government stooges and recover his spacecraft so that he can escape this backwater planet--defeating droves of Men in Black, and generally killing everything insight.

While Alien Hominid has a pretty basic side-scrolling shooter structure, it also deviates from the traditional genre in some interesting ways. Players will have a chance to commandeer a wide variety of vehicles--including a yeti, and use six different weapons to shoot and slash their way to gory freedom. The console version also retains the quirky humor of the original allowing Hominid to piggy back ride foes, eat enemies heads, and obtain power-ups from extraterrestrial friendly fat kids.

While the funky graphics and oddball humor permeates throughout the title, some major omissions flaw the games happy-go-lucky gaming experience. Alien Hominids control scheme doesn't allow for players to fire diagonally. Also, the console version is intended for 2 players--single player games are frustratingly hard due to the cheap AI.

Even with its defects, Alien Hominid is a solid game worthy of checking out. The game also includes several mini-games, minor customization features, and did I mention the yeti?

Comments [0]

post a comment

Post a Comment