Game Review: Alien Breed Evolution

Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1

For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade

From: Team17 Software

ESRB Rating: Teen (blood and gore, violence)

Connoisseurs of 20-year-old computer games might remember the Amiga game "Alien Breed," a fairly traditional overhead shooter in which players defended the corridors of a spaceship from waves of aliens bent on hijacking the ship and taking humanity down with it.

Two decades and numerous technological advancements on, the premise remains unchanged in "Alien Breed Evolution: Episode 1." A new ship is under attack by a horde of bug-like aliens, little human life remains aboard, and the object - fight off the aliens, escape with your life - hasn't changed.

Because this is a $10 downloadable game and not a big-budget reboot, "Evolution" is, indeed, little more than an evolution. Polygons constitute the graphics instead of pixels, but the action still takes place from an overhead perspective, and it rarely gets more complicated than "shoot aliens, go to checkpoint, trigger switch, repeat."

Taken for what it is and within the constraints of its old-fashioned sensibilities - and it's important to emphasize that these old methods most definitely aren't for everyone anymore - "Evolution" gets far more right than it does wrong. Like "Shadow Complex" and "Bionic Commando: Rearmed" before it, the game deftly mixes 3D graphics and 2D perspectives, resulting in animation and visual effects that weren't even imaginable during the Amiga's prime.

The general gameplay benefits in kind. Doubling back to avoid encroaching aliens, for instance, is easy because the animation and controls are so fluid. And while this isn't a dual-stick shooter in the same vein as "Geometry Wars" and its ilk, "Evolution" uses both joysticks to great effect, making it easy to strafe and shoot when aliens attack from multiple directions. As contemporary solutions to old gameplay problems go, "Evolution" gets the important stuff right.

With that said, there's a reason these games don't appear as often as they once did. "Evolution's" moment-to-moment gameplay is fun, but it sticks to a formula, and little happens in the last chapter that doesn't also happen in the first. A secondary Assault mode, which supports co-op play (two players, local or online) and ditches the exploration in favor of punishing players with ridiculous waves of aliens, is a nice bonus. But that mode is as straightforward as it sounds, and no part of "Evolution" dares to be different than the many overhead shooters that preceded it.

Consequently, it's a bit puzzling that "Evolution" is coming at us in three episodic installments. The first episode's gameplay and production values make it an excellent value in its own right, but its storytelling - to say nothing of the iffy end-episode cliffhanger - leaves a lot to be desired. Whatever lies in store for the second episode, it'll need to provide more than a continuation of a story that, so far, isn't terribly engaging. Paying $10 after 20 years for an updated take on "Breed" is an entirely recommendable act, but dropping another $10 a few months later won't be if episode two is nothing but more of the exact same thing.

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