Developer: CI Games
Publisher: CI Games
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows
Alien Rage – Review
Massive explosions, huge bosses, aliens and a massive weapon arsenal! Who wouldn’t like this combination? Alien Rage is the latest game by CI Games, and it’s a good one! Alien Rage is a futuristic first person action shooter which will keep you busy for hours, not to mention the laughter you will have with the masochistic protagonist and the hilarious one liners from the alien bosses!
Story
The story in Alien Rage is almost non existing and hard to be found (in the form of audio logs scattered throughout the levels). It’s about 200 years from now, we discovered a weird asteroid with a new kind of resource, called promethium. This promethium can power our whole planet and is almost non-exhaustible. After a while of mining, an alien race, the Vorus, decided they wanted some promethium from our asteroid as well, we collaborated, but things escalated quickly!
The audio logs contain voice samples of a researcher that was on the planet when the humans and the Vorus still worked together, the Vorus insisted that the humans would not use the promethium for weaponry, as it is against their “religion”. As you progress through the audio logs, it seems that the Vorus aren’t as peaceful after all. When least expected, the Vorus attack the humans and take all the promethium for themselves. And of course, if we can’t have some, then nobody can. You are on a mission to stop the Vorus and destroy the entire planet so nobody can use the resource ever again.
Graphics
I love the graphics in this game, it’s a modern shooter so everything looks really cool and sci-fi ish. The game runs very smoothly and there aren’t any frame drops when there’s a lot of action.
Bosses and monsters are well designed and look great, terrain and details aren’t always that great though. But overall the graphics are pretty solid, especially for a cheap game like this!
Oh… That’s one big mother. Big gun too.
Sound
The music in Alien Rage is pretty good. It’s the typical music you expect from action games, it pushes you to rush through the levels as fast as you can, and this music does it well!
Sound effects from the guns are very well done and sound unique, they don’t sound like your stereotypical shooter, pretty obvious because this game is based in the future. Sound effects and voices are also very cool, the voices are all recorded, so it’s nice to have a dialogue here and there. The aliens have their own language, but your AI which you communicate with does a good job translating. Some dialogues are also pretty funny, especially when a boss says “say hello to my little friend!”.
Gameplay
Now for the gameplay! Alien Rage is very fun, but also very hard to play. After playing for a while, you will understand the “Rage” part in the name.
Controls are pretty basic for a shooter, moving, melee, crouch, shoot, etc. There are no special controls which make it unique from any other shooter.
The only thing that is slightly different from most shooters is that Alien Rage works with a score system. With this score you can unlock upgrades to make your character tougher and make your weapons stronger. My favorite upgrade is the last one, it transforms your standard pistol which you always carry around into a promethium shooting canon which one shots most enemies, once you got this upgrade, it’s pretty much a piece of cake.
Without this last upgrade, the game is surprisingly hard, even on the lowest difficulty. Enemies are often equipped with explosive weaponry or even a machine gun, which makes it pretty hard to just rush in and shoot everything.
The levels are scattered with orange barrels, which is basically unstable, unrefined promethium which explodes when shot. You can use this to your advantage to destroy some bridges or just blow away tons of enemies. Or you could just use one of your secondary fire modes on your weapons, which are pretty strong! So, orange barrels and overpowered secondary fire modes, that means a lot of explosions and ridiculous scenario’s where you can take out dozens of enemies with just 2 shots. This usually leads to a very huge score boost, which you need to unlock more upgrades!
The game also has some collectibles: audio logs and special bonus items which boost your score. Each level has 3 audio logs and 3 bonus items.
If you are done playing single player and trying to increase your score over and over, you can always check out the multiplayer which has a team-deathmatch and a normal deathmatch, nothing really special there.
Conclusion
Alien Rage is a great game to pick up due to its relatively low price. It will keep you busy for hours and amaze you time and time again with huge boss fights and massive amount of action. The fact that it’s score based means that you will return to every level to try and beat your previous score and search for the collectibles you didn’t find yet! Overall this is a very fun shooter and I highly recommend it to everyone who likes games in its genre.
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