GamesRelay

Name: Alien Breed Evolution: Episode One

Team17 have looked into their archives and plucked out one of the most favoured franchises from yesteryear and seen fit to resurrect it; Alien Breed was a game first seen in 1991 on the Commodore Amiga and took the form of a top down shooting game, it unashamedly took it's cue from the Alien movie franchise, although totally unofficially of course. Team17 released a Special Edition of the game a year later which would be one of the most popular games on the Amiga, lasting more than a year in the UK games charts, following on from that success two sequels where spawned, Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues and Alien Breed: Tower Assault in 1993 and 1994 respectively.

A PC port of the game was made but was criticised for not being as good as the original with key elements of the games charm missing. Fifteen years later and the game has been given a new lease of life and remade in 3D (of sorts) using the Unreal 3 engine, can Team17 repeat their success for a new generation of machines and gamers?

Sticking close to the original premise of the game, Alien Breed Evolution introduces you to the game with a short comic book like story which tells you that another ship has collided with your own, the Leopold, while on a deep space machine, you're ship is damaged and people need to be rescued. You take control of the Chief Engineer of the ship, Conrad, who is assisted by Mia an officer on board the ship. Mia guides you via a series of waypoints to different areas of the ship that need attention for one reason or another, some need to be repaired and others need to be shut down. Of course it was never going to be that easy and your damaged ship constantly works against you to thwart your efforts, add to that the ship that has crashed into you has some not so nice aliens on board who have invaded your ship and your going to have to pull off some heroic feats to compete your mission.

Mostly the game involves following waypoints to a specific location; finding out that you can't continue along that path until you've found a key card, put out a fire or released some toxic gas from within a particular room. Mia instructs you where to find the appropriate item that will allow you to continue along your journey. This can become a bit frustrating as you've got to do this in order, so, if you have played the game already then you can't hurry it along, you'll have to run to a specific point before you can activate something you need, a computer or a switch, and you'll end up running back for it. There's very little room for exploration aboard your ship, most paths are laid out in front of you quite easily, you can get a little sidetracked exploring some of the rooms for little bits and pieces such as extra ammo or a medical kit but you're never going to be lost.

As well as just being strewn along the floor you can search lockers and human corpses for extra items, this involves holding down a button while a timer bar counts down to indicate how long you must hold the button down for. This search can be interrupted by aliens attacking you so you've to make sure the area is clear before looting for goodies. This same system of holding down a button is also used when using card access terminals for doors or computer terminals, some require you to activate them for longer depending on how complicated the procedure must be.

The aliens that have boarded your ship may look a little familiar if you've seen any of the major science fiction films in the past couple of years, the first ones you'll come across look remarkably like the face huggers from the Alien films, the second most common variety will look like their bigger brothers, all black with teeth and bleeding acid, later on in the game you'll come across some that will look suspiciously like the giant aliens from the Starship Troopers series of films. Even later in the game you'll come across a room with what looks like cocoons in it that the aliens are born from, suffice to say that this game borrows heavily from various sources. There isn't a great deal of variety in them either, there are a couple of different types thrown in there but as you get towards the back end of the game then you start to encounter some that are just the same as the other aliens except a different colour, nothing to distracting but it might have been good to see a few more types of aliens, especially when you reach their ship.