Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded

I got this game on Steam some time ago, and I can say I have never regretted the investment. This game is full of guns, aliens, secret rooms and well-paced action to keep you entertained for hours. A major difference to the Alien Shooter 1 is that your character now gains experience and levels, and with each level you get to enhance your attributes for more health, accuracy, speed, strength or intelligence, and a special ability which you choose in the beginning of game, and which vary from finding extra money to regenerating health and several others. To further enhance your abilities you can purchase special implants that boost your skills and stats so that you can move faster, do more damage, carry more and take more punishment from the aliens. The weapons vary from a simple nailgun to big pistols, massive miniguns, laser miniguns, rocket launchers and energy weapons, all suited for different styles of play. The selection is staggering. To reduce the damage you take you can buy suits of body armour which also affect the appearance of your character, depending what type of armour it is. Miscellaneous utilities and tools include flashloghts, night vision goggles, medical kits, attack drones and a scanner, and some other bits. The gameplay is quite fun, with some outdoor driving levels where you drive an armoured car with a machine gun and mow down massive hordes of aliens. So if you loved Alien Shooter 1, you will love this even more! And even the price won't break the bank, at $5.99

It's hard to put a finger on why i don't like this one as much, but here i go. It seems to take itself a little too seriously for what it is. New shader effects and increased graphics are loved by many, but in this simplistic game seems only fit to clutter the scene and detract from what you're ultimate goal is (mindless slaughter). I meen is this a resident evil horror game? Is it an RPG? Who cares what my character looks like and why do marines carry around friction powered torches that only last for 30 seconds? It seems to carry this casual franchise too far away from what made it good; just how casual the game was. Now with depleting reserves and upgraded weapons that may as well be represented as pistol +1 or rifles +2 you end up with the idea of taking weapons based solely on their damage spec or taking a gun like a desert eagle and doing pretty much no damage. Don't get me wrong it's worth the price being DRM free, it's just that everything alien shooter is doesn't seem to exactly be helped with the changes the developer has made in the series. What they should have focused on is different modes like perhaps a pinball & tower defense modes or even a leaderboard time attack mode.

NOTE: this "Reloaded" version is a gutted version of the original Alien Shooter 2: Vengeance. The less music and the cutting of co-op campaign and multiplayer really hurt the offering. Also, it does not include the Conscription stand-alone expansion. There is no legal way to get the old version. In co-op, it could be a 4.5 / 5.0 game. Summary: The game starts as a well-designed, well-paced survival quest game, though after a couple of missions, degrades into mediocre, long slogfests that cover only one quest and last over 70 % of the playthrough. After you hit the latter part, the game becomes progressively more not-worth-playing. Graphics would be phenomenal, though the light colouring of monsters and backgrounds makes it very diffcult to easily spot enemies. Add in the pointless lighting busy-work with flare gun in order to hit anything and even the graphics become a drag. Despite 3D, the devs still did not make walls transparent, so you are basically blind to anything coming through narrow corridors or near the bottom and right-hand side walls. Fortunately, a lot of the levels are wide enough to minize the blindness. Music sucks in general and is mostly recycled from the first Alien Shooter. It uses the same annoying e-guitar track for action that is eerily similar to PS1 VIP Theme, i.e. is very awful. The original release had more music tracks. Levels are properly short in the beginning and gruesomely long in the end, with multiple segments. They are also littered with tough enemies, which start insta-spawning all over you at the later levels. That is pretty much going to kill you for sure or at least use a lot of your health packs unless you have end-game Ion Cannon, which most of the time it happens, YOU DON'T. Cheap AF. The devs fell back to their petty AS1 tricks such as insanely tough regular enemies shooting infinite range homing missiles and the acid spitters creating 5-ticks-per-second spots that last a long time. F this game. All about grinding.

Don't get me wrong. I love mindless fun, and shooting lots of aliens, but my word......it is not uncommon to shoot the same alien 1000s of times in the same level so that you can move 3 inches and shoot another 500 aliens. After spending 20 minutes in one room just holding the LMB while I killed wave after wave of aliens so I could move to the next room to do the same thing for 5 minutes, it dawned in me that it wasn't fun anymore. This game actually made shooting aliens with heavy weapons boring.....quite a feat. Pass on this one.