Alien Storm (Genesis/Mega Drive)

The beat ’em up genre is one that conjures an expected gameplay and visual style more than most, with many members of the genre being a 2D sidescroller where the player moves a character through a stage punching, kicking, and grappling with any enemy that gets in their path. When you see that Alien Storm avoids those combat staples by giving its three playable characters a lightning gun, flamethrower, and an electrified whip, it might seem like it’s adding a unique alteration to the beat ’em up formula with long ranged attack options as default. However, when it quickly becomes apparent that each weapon essentially has the same range as a rather good kick, that angle seems to exist more as a visual variation rather than something with a heavy influence on gameplay.

 

Alien Storm has no real pretense of being anything more than a game about killing aliens. In fact, the plot is just that aliens are invading to kill people and you play as the guys looking to kill them first. Playing as either Garth with his electrical gun, Karen with her flamethrower, or the robot Scooter with his lightning whip, you’ll find no character really has a major edge when it comes to playability or capability. Besides the visuals of their attacks, they all fight the same, your moves mostly consisting of a simple combo of pressing the same button repeatedly, sometimes in a different rhythm or situation to get slightly different results that amount to more or less hits. Combat mostly comes down to standing in front of the alien you want to kill and executing your attack until the alien is hit backwards, giving you an opening to either follow up and attack them while they are down or turning to a different alien to begin whaling on them. If you are getting overwhelmed by too many aliens, each character has a different visual spin on a super attack that hits all foes on screen for some decent damage. The other way to get yourself out of a bind comes in the form of a dodge roll, allowing you to get from one side of the screen to the other fairly easily as you make back, forth, up and down movements to try and keep the aliens from ganging up on you in a skirmish.

The beat ’em up style of play isn’t the only thing on offer in Alien Storm though. Often taking place near the end of a level are first-person segments where you point your weapon in on a scene packed with destructible objects and aliens skulking about behind them as they try and find an opportunity to leap out and attack or fire projectiles at you. The goal is obvious and straightforward here, just shoot all the aliens before they can hurt you and the stage will be over, but it’s made a bit more satisfying by having most every inch of the area be breakable, with pick-ups hiding within so that it’s not just enjoyable but potentially useful. There are humans who run past who, if shot, will give you a health penalty, but they’re not so abundant that you’ll be tricked by their presence often. The foes you face in this segment aren’t really too challenging though, often dying quickly and relying on horde tactics to try and land even the smallest bit of damage, but the segments are also not all that long so it packs in quick action when you do enter this mode. A bit less compact are the rare running segments, where your character will be running to the right automatically as enemies fly in to try and damage you. These stages are surprisingly uncommon and you won’t face much in the way of interesting obstacles during them, with perhaps the biggest worry being a boss who drops things you might need to jump over with what is normally your roll button. The game certainly feels like it could have tapped this style of play more, but it appears to be a somewhat half-baked idea since you can just keep shooting to kill most enemies and barely need to move to avoid what you can’t shoot.

 

While the first-person and running segments both can be fairly easily finished with wild shooting, Alien Storm does actually try to make the player cautious about their weapon use with an energy system. So long as you have energy, you can use your default weapons. The lightning gun, flamethrower, and whip all require that energy to use, and if you run out, you’ll be reduced to unexciting and ineffectual melee attacks until you can get a refill. The odd thing about this though is that you’ll hardly ever encounter that issue unless you specifically set yourself up for it or are incredibly sloppy and inaccurate with your attacks. Being aware of the limitation should immediately make you not waste it, so as long as you’re always trying to hit an enemy or are in the less draining first-person and running modes, it’s not going to be a concern as the game continues to toss energy pick-ups to you throughout the game. There is an option to reduce how much energy you get if you want that to be a challenge, but it almost feels like an unnecessary concern in the first place, the game becoming less enjoyable if you do lose out on the visually interesting attacks and have to scrape by with the weak close range ones. The only moment it seems to even come up is in the short Duel Mode, where you take on a series of enemies in a row without getting energy refills, so the challenge there seems to be more about the resource management rather than survival. Your super abilities do drain a chunk of your energy when they are used as well, but a proper level of caution and abundant power-ups means you can both use these when you do actually need them and the energy reserves still might as well not exist. Perhaps if energy was only tied to super moves it could be a more important consideration, but health is actually the rarer resource in this game.

Alien Storm seems very stingy with its health pick-ups, but that seems to be to its benefit. The difficulty balancing in Alien Storm actually seems to be designed pretty intelligently. If you wish to just beat the game, Easy will get you there without totally holding your hand. Normal feels like a fairly good sweet spot. The game gives you three continues to work with, and Normal mode’s difficulty level, while perhaps being a bit harder than the deceptive name, feels quite achievable with that death cushioning. Even if you don’t make it through your first try, you’ll get the knowledge needed to do better next time and gradually get your health to stick around longer in a game that only lasts 8 stages. Hard is of course for a player who feels they’ve got a hang of the basic skills at their disposal and the behavior of the aliens they’ll face, adding something for the player who is really aiming to test the limits of their brawler abilities.

 

The bulk of the game takes place in the beat ’em up sidescroller stages, aliens coming at you in small groups and the screen only letting you continue once you’ve wiped out the current batch. The different varieties of aliens have attacks that can do varying degrees of damage, but mostly their appearance is just a warning of their movement style, with things like the tentacle ball monsters able to leap at you and the insect-like bug aliens flying around much quicker than other types. There are some unique creatures like stalks that can’t be permanently killed and will spray you if you get too close as well as some projectile firing foes, but the battles you have will almost always come down to proper positioning. You need to make sure that , while handling one alien, another doesn’t get in and attack you from behind, making it necessary to learn when to disengage, how to guide aliens around the screen, and of course when the situation might call for a super move to avoid losing your valuable health. This game can be played simultaneously with two players though, leading to some disruption of what feels like the main challenging element of the combat, but having a friend along to help out can make up for that decline in difficulty with some mutual enjoyment instead.

 

The bosses at least still put up a fight in co-op, although there’s not much variety to them. Most enemies in the game have a brief period of being stunned while you’re hitting them before they fly backwards, making the combos possible and letting you switch targets to someone behind you if need be without having to immediately worry about who you were hitting before, but the bosses don’t have that worry. Their threat comes from being able to keep dishing out their same attack over and over whether or not you’re hitting them or even near them. The beat ’em up bosses are all about walking back and forth and hitting them when you find the right opening, and the bosses in the other play styles are also pretty much a regular foe fought for a longer period of time. They put up as good a fight as the regular aliens despite being on their own, but they’re not particularly exciting in design and don’t require much thought to overcome.

THE VERDICT: While characters using flamethrowers and lightning guns may make Alien Storm seem like it’s going to be an interesting twist on the beat ’em up genre, they are actually just visual upgrades to the genre’s typical punching and kicking attacks. In many ways, a visual shift is all Alien Storm has to set it apart. It plays like a solid beat ’em up, bashing groups of enemies is inherently fun and your foes are distributed properly to keep you moving and attacking with a bit of strategy. The game never really goes beyond this though. Despite including segments for first-person shooting and run-and-gun action, they are thin novelties more about the fundamental level of fun those genres carry. Funnily enough, Alien Storm’s meager story fits the gameplay well. You’re set up to fight aliens by the plot and that’s exactly what you do, not much more, not much less.

 

And so, I give Alien Storm for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

An OKAY rating. Alien Storm sits on a line many beat ’em up games find themselves in, where enjoying the basics of the genre will help determine whether a player will enjoy it or not. The fighting is technically repetitive but also has gradually emerging variation. Your attacks, while the developers tried to limit it and failed, are going to be the same throughout, something that rubs some people the wrong way but also makes the focus more about positioning yourself to deal with the enemies on screen than your attack selection. Using weapons instead of your bare fists gives it a visual flair, especially when Karen calls in a nuke for her special or when Scooter uses his built-in weaponry to supplement his whip strikes, but they don’t pack any more punch than what you’d expect of a punch (although if you’re reduced to punching in this game, then you feel the power discrepancy in a bad way). If it had embraced its weapon design more or made the breaks into different gameplay styles more substantial and uniquely challenging, Alien Storm would have a stronger identity to separate it from the genre standard.

 

While Alien Storm tried to deviate from the trappings of its genre, it’s not hard to peel them back and see it fits quite snugly into the beat ’em up family. Tearing through aliens may be done in a few different ways than expected in Alien Storm, but none of the modes really stand out since they only include just enough to facilitate the simple excitement found in defeating a bunch of bad guys.