This game gives some great tools for a run and gun game, such as a satisfying dash move, which deals explosive damage at full health, a "counter" which turns projectiles into health, or reflects them back to the enemies, and 6 weapons balanced around their power and ammo drain.
The problems I have with Alien Soldier are that the actual levels feel tacked on. It's effectively a boss rush game, but for some reason you spend about 30 seconds in small corridor sections getting past easy enemies. It's not that these sections are completely pointless, they essentially let you get health and ammo between bosses, but they're so easy and short that you wonder why they bother putting enemies there at all instead of just giving you the free stuff between short corridors.
The game needed to be able to automatically swap weapons when one runs out of ammo, or have weapon swapping be a single button press. Trying to change weapons in the middle of a boss battle is a guarantee hit because of how little breathing room there is.
Some weapons also just flat out don't work on some bosses and I wasn't sure why that was.
Bosses themselves generally vary too much in difficulty, and definitely not in a linear way. Some of the earlier bosses were way harder than some of the ones in the later ones. In fact stage 20 has by far the hardest boss in the game, not only because it's 5 phases, but because the last phase is some true bullshit where you need to hit very specific parts of the boss (and the homing weapon doesn't work here), while dodging mines AND the bosses limbs. And since you're floating the entire time you can only dash left and right, not up and down. By contrast the stage 21 boss was one of the easiest in the game, and even the final boss is a complete joke once you work out how to damage it.
This game has all the tools for a fantastic game in its genre, but instead kinda just does the bare minimum with it. At least the bosses are generally fun, with 1 or 2 exceptions.
The problems I have with Alien Soldier are that the actual levels feel tacked on. It's effectively a boss rush game, but for some reason you spend about 30 seconds in small corridor sections getting past easy enemies. It's not that these sections are completely pointless, they essentially let you get health and ammo between bosses, but they're so easy and short that you wonder why they bother putting enemies there at all instead of just giving you the free stuff between short corridors.
The game needed to be able to automatically swap weapons when one runs out of ammo, or have weapon swapping be a single button press. Trying to change weapons in the middle of a boss battle is a guarantee hit because of how little breathing room there is.
Some weapons also just flat out don't work on some bosses and I wasn't sure why that was.
Bosses themselves generally vary too much in difficulty, and definitely not in a linear way. Some of the earlier bosses were way harder than some of the ones in the later ones. In fact stage 20 has by far the hardest boss in the game, not only because it's 5 phases, but because the last phase is some true bullshit where you need to hit very specific parts of the boss (and the homing weapon doesn't work here), while dodging mines AND the bosses limbs. And since you're floating the entire time you can only dash left and right, not up and down. By contrast the stage 21 boss was one of the easiest in the game, and even the final boss is a complete joke once you work out how to damage it.
This game has all the tools for a fantastic game in its genre, but instead kinda just does the bare minimum with it. At least the bosses are generally fun, with 1 or 2 exceptions.