Alien Storm

80%

I remember when Alien storm first came out most people rather unfairly in my opinion referred to it as Golden Axe with aliens. On the surface Alien storm does share quiet a few similarity's with the Axe both made by Sega both basically of the old side scrolling beat em up mold, a choice of 3 different characters. Golden Axe and a lot of games like it suffer from the repetitiveness of the genre. You kill identy-kit enemy after enemy then get to the odd boss who is basically a enemy who looks a bit different hits harder and has a longer health bar. Alien storm stood out at the time for me by trying to add some different styles of game play to the mix to reduce the repetitiveness. Firstly you have Operation Wolf inspired bits were you go through TV shops and supermarkets blasting aliens and shooting energy and health to collect them. Then you have sections when you are running along and shooting at enemy's trying to reach the end of the level. For a beat em up it seems quite fast really with skilled players diving across the screen from side to side dodging the hordes Its not inventive in every way its plot is basic Aliens are trying to invade earth and you have to stop them, you have your typical choice of 3 combatants in this case a Man a Woman and a Robot. There not bad they do the job but its the aliens that are truly worthy of praise theres a reasonable number of different types from little goblinesqe things that claw at you to sludgy things that scrape along the floor and try to swallow you whole but the real beauty of it is when you see them hiding in dustbins or dressed as civilians despite having a huge purple melon for a head. The games style is a sort of what people in the 50s thought about space men and aliens your wearing a sort of shiny boiler suit with a short distance hand laser connected to a back pack fighting evil hideous aliens while objectives are shot up on the screen at the start of every level like ' SAVE THE PEOPLE' The whole point of this review then is to help people decide if its worth downloading and paying to play Alien storm. My answer is a definite yes; simply put, on the face of it the Final Fight and Streets of Rage games may appear to have held up infinitely better than Alien Storm, what with there higher quality soundtracks and more serious tone. But this game has its own spark. It brakes up the action in interesting ways and in doing so tries to tackle some of the weakness's that caused the genres demise, it has a sense of humor and is different enough to the other games of its type to stand on its own and not be considered just another one of those final fight clone games. Is it a streets of rage beater? No is it better than golden axe? Yes