You know, if I had a choice of which fictional aliens to be invaded by, it would be these kindly gentlemen. These fellows, who never fail to stop and wait their turn when a cutscene begins; simply standing there awkwardly asking if they can go yet, like me at a party. But funny alien breedhaviour aside, this is game is a sequel, apparently. The most significant difference you will findYou know, if I had a choice of which fictional aliens to be invaded by, it would be these kindly gentlemen. These fellows, who never fail to stop and wait their turn when a cutscene begins; simply standing there awkwardly asking if they can go yet, like me at a party. But funny alien breedhaviour aside, this is game is a sequel, apparently. The most significant difference you will find between Alien Breed: Impact and Alien Breed 2: Assault is that the text and HUD changed from blue to green. There, your most impactful improvement is quite literally the same system as Pokemon Blue and Green (or Red for non Japanese types, though apparently the next game brings in the red aesthetic so full circle, here we come).
I'm really not kidding. This has the same feel to it as buying individual episodes of a Tell Tale series. It's the exact same game, it's just the next part. So read my review of Alien Breed: Impact for the fundamentals. As, unless stated otherwise, everything in that review applies here.
May as well start with story as that's mostly what this game is supposed to bring to the Alien Breed table if the big '2' in the title didn't tip you off to that. It continues exactly where the last one left off and... that's it. There's some development that incidentally calls the title into question, and there's two random philosophical lines/quotes about life and death for some reason. They don't explore that as a theme, I think they just liked hearing the words. Otherwise, it's more dissonant than anything. Comrade Conrad acts like a real goof in any cutscene despite supposedly being a gruff action hero. And Mia... Good lord, Mia. She acts all sweet in the comic book cutscenes, but when you meet her in game she talks to you like you JUST divorced her. It's like the text dialogue and the voiced dialogue were written by two different people. And there is more text dialogue here than an actual text adventure. I couldn't tell you what 90% of it said. I think it usually boiled down to "turn the power on... you idiot."
Gameplay wise it's pretty much the same, except it's also pretty much not the same. Same mechanics, sure, but designed differently. One aspect that became a minor irritation in the first game was that there was a lack of vertical aiming, you had to rely on Conrad's autotargeting for anything not at eye level. That usually meant he would lob a few shots over the heads of small targets like the zergling face huggers, and eventually they would die when one bullet was forced down by the hand of God to lightly smite its scalp. This would occasionally happen with large enemies too. To this day I have no idea what Conrad was aiming at. Maybe there was a spider on the ceiling and he doesn't like spiders. Worse than horrid murder aliens, spiders are. This is so much worse here on a general level and I have no idea why. But even worse is that they suddenly figured out how to make levels have more Y-axis variability. Seemingly, ramps are a new invention so everyone wants 4 in their backyards. If you are now asking how you shoot enemies that are lower or higher than the ground you're standing on, without having any vertical aiming, then you'd be a wise, worldly fellow. Truth is, you don't. You either move well away, or wait for Conrad to decide the enemy is close enough to risk the extra stress on his back to slightly bend over. I guess it's progressive to have an action hero that needs a back brace.
There are a few other little ticks from the first game that they doubled down on here. The first game already had so many random explosions and screen shake that even Michael Bay would think it was overkill. Doubled down, this now makes the game appear more like super Michael Bay's new found footage film. Seeing anything at all is just 76.658% harder now. Spray and Pray is tactical grade A here.
Finally, I have to mention the camera. Everyone does and uniqueness is never a trait that I screamed other than being uniquely gifted in self-loathing. I guess they took everyone's feedback on the last game's camera and decided to have several sections with a fixed point camera instead of its usual floaty self. That was not a good idea. Stick to what you know, I say, or become Alien Breed 2: Assault. Good luck knowing what the hell is going on in any of these sections, as the camera super glues itself to the corner like timeout from my abusive nanny, and decides vision and spatial awareness is for nerds. We're too cool to have defined viewpoints.
There are some good points, of course. They couldn't possibly have learned nothing; they're not me from the ages of 12-21. They made waypoints guide you to the objective rather than sticking on one end of the map and saying 'come play hide and seek in this endless series of hallways.' There's also less backtracking, somewhat (remember that caveat?). Nothing else, that's all.
It's the same game, but shakier (literally). Play the first game twice for a better experience.… Expand
Alien Breed 2: AssaultYour Score0 out of 10User Score
