Shadowgrounds

RECOMMENDED ONLY IF YOU ARE OKAY KILLING THE SAME ALIENS OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Most people: skip this one. It has the most clichee alien invasion content out there. It is basically Alien Breed with a bigger budget and half the direction and the originality. The music is all over the place and cannot stick with one overall theme or style. The graphics don't matter in this genre and the gameplay is repetitive AF. Still, it is much better than SG Survivor that was a half-assed and awful across the board.

There was Shadowgrounds. This game is genuine fun! If you like "isometric" shooters, this is a good one. I can't recommend the sequel, Survivor, though - they added physics and the optimization is super bad.

...it is tempting to rate this game badly overall, but that wouldn't be fair to the game. Outside of a few specific moments around one specific enemy type (one of the last it introduces) the game is a whole lot of fun, running around and gunning down hoards of alien forces interspersed with slower moments when you are exploring the ruins they left behind to find resources, complete whatever objective you have at the moment, and dealing with the remaining forces still prowling around. Its moody, atmospheric, and just a great time. What holds it back is really just a set of cutscenes aging badly, the game running out of steam and new ideas just shy of the grand finale, and occasional just plain bad ideas (like that enemy I keep mentioning but don't want to spoil and the entire ending cutscene). So it's not so much a bad game as clearly a "first game" and one that time has not been kind to. If you like horror themed action games, you can do FAR FAR worse then to pick this one up.

Shadowgrounds is a top-down shooter with a linear story campaign where you fight hordes of alien monsters on some alien planet. Overall, it's a pretty bog-standard sci-fi premise that only serves as an excuse to put you in a situation where the goal of winning a game is to kill everything in your path and perhaps accomplish a few basic objectives along the way. It may not be overly ambitious or deep, and the story, characters, and voice acting mostly serve as a wallpaper for all the action. But it's a decent game and I had a lot of fun playing through the campaign. Another notable thing is that the game didn't give me too much trouble on a technical front, as it was running flawlessly straight out of the box. The default control scheme plays like a fairly standard third-person shooter, with horizontal aiming strictly following your mouse movements, except for the camera being positioned in an overhead view instead of following your character from behind. An alternate control scheme is available, and it turns the game into more of a twin-stick shooter, but that somehow felt a bit clunky for me and I preferred to play it with the default aiming scheme. Perhaps this works better if you want to play on a controller, which is also possible. Visuals were also a highlight for me. Of course, being a game from almost 20 years ago, some aspects may feel dated, however, the effective use of frame effects and dynamic shadows that are cast everywhere from the beam of your ever-present flashlight creates a very moody atmosphere. I often found myself jumping at literal shadows. It's a good example of how a game that makes good use of the technology of the time, can still look aesthetically pleasing decades later. Personally, I prefer sharp and crisp graphics like these over any game that overuses post-processing effects to cover the imperfections of the modeling or textures.

A fun game. Great when you don't want to think much and just want to kill some aliens.