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PRE-GAME

You’re a little yellow alien who was just minding your own business cruising over Earth when the FBI picked up your signal and shot you down.  Now stranded, you must reclaim your ship and escape from Earth while doing your best to fend off the thousands of agents and other obstacles that stand in your way!

EYE-SPY

THE HOOK:  I have actually been waiting for this game for a while now. This game was created from a Flash game on Newgrounds.com that was downloaded over 7.5 million times. The game’s creators put together a new version and got it published by 0~3 Entertainment for release in North America. Besides that fact that the original version was amazing for a flash game, I felt compelled to support the creators in their first attempt at a console game.

HOW IT LOOKS AND FEELS: In an effort to stay true to the original, AH is a 2D side scroller. All of the art and animations are hand drawn and give the game a comedic brutal feel. The game’s style and animations may not be cutting edge technology wise, but they do serve as a uniquely animated kill fest that most anyone will enjoy watching.

The game’s controls are simple and pretty easy to master. The left analog stick moves the hominid left and right and pushing the stick down lets him duck. Square lets you fire or charge up your shot, circle fires grenades, triangle lets you board vehicles or dig underground, and X lets you jump. L1 and R1 let you roll left and right to avoid enemy fire.

The game play in AH is frantic and intense! Enemies will swarm you from all directions and do not stop spawning! Once the level has begun, you won’t have a moment to catch your breath as you’re blasting away various enemies and minibosses. You will also acquire various powerups that change the way your gun fires and more importantly, in what painful way your enemies die. Besides straight running and gunning, you can jump onto an enemy’s head and then throw them into their friends or simply bite their head off! Besides running and gunning, there are also levels that involve driving/flying various vehicles. Being a linear game, the change isn’t significantly different (kill the massive bosses and nonstop baddies) but they do keep the game interesting and are as much of a blast as the rest of the game to play.

HOW IT SOUNDS: The music is AH is nothing special, but does a good job of complementing the action at hand. My personal favorite track is the carnival music that plays at the end of every level.

EXTRAS: By destroying certain buildings or defeating enemies in a particular way, you can unlock hats. These hats are used to distinguish your Hominid from the others in the games various multi-player modes. The hats aren’t very hard to collect, but there are 50 of them so you probably won’t come across every single one on your first run through the game.

There are also several different multiplayer modes and minigames, one of which being the “PDA games”. The PDA games are little games that up to 4 people can play in and that you can design yourself with a built in level editor. It’s not very elaborate, but is nice bonus and can be pretty amusing.

CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE: Some small cut scenes between levels serve to further the storyline and occasionally deliver a laugh or two. Not having a very elaborate story to tell, the game isn’t very cinematic.

BEST PLAYER: The only playable character is the alien, but I do have a favorite hat and powerup. Give me the Chinese hat and an acid powerup and bring on the baddies! I like the acid since its one of the strongest powerups, even if it does need a closer range. As for the hat…I just can’t say no to something so cool looking!

CHEAT CODE YOU NEED: AH doesn’t have any “necessary” cheats, but you’ll get an afro hat if you enter your player name as “superfly”.

CHEAT CODE YOU WANT: Being a fan of the animator, Dan Paladin’s work, I think it would have been awesome if some of his original characters were unlockable.  My personal pick would be “Synji,” a blue demon with a sword. Another awesome unlockable character would have been “Pico.”  Pico is a small boy with an Uzi and was created by Tom Fulp (Creator of Newgrounds.com and coder of the original AH) in one of Newground’s most popular games.

OH MAN! MOMENT: I think it would be more appropriate to just cross out the word “moment” and replace it so the category reads, “Oh Man! This Game Is Freaking Hard!”  No matter what difficulty you pick, you WILL watch your alien pal die a variety of painful deaths over and over again.  Picking a specific spot, I’d have to go with the electric death-trap miniboss in level 3-2.  Why? Because it’s a little tricky to shoot the right glowing electrode to hurt the thing while shooting all the fakes AND fending off the respawning enemies that love to shoot at you while you’re trying to do 2 other things!

GLITCH ITCH: I found some minor glitches in AH, mostly involving the generic enemies getting stuck during my “victory dance” at the end of a level or being immortal for no apparent reason until I forced them off the screen.  The only other problem I ran into was in the level 1-3 miniboss. Sometimes he’d run right off the screen and not come back for a minute or two. In addition, the game froze on me once while I was playing.

FAN SERVICE: This game contains various references to Newgrounds and includes some comically named buildings.  Be sure to look at your surroundings amidst the sea of carnage and get in a good laugh or two.

END GAME:

Now I know what you may be asking yourselves right now, why am I pimping a game that looks like it could have come out years ago? The reason is that you really can’t compare Alien Hominid to the graphically advanced games of today because that’s not what it’s trying to be. This game was made in the spirit of games like Metal Slug and Contra, games swarming with hundreds of enemies huge bosses and linear action. For me, Alien Hominid was a much-appreciated blast from the past. An old school styled game that was challenging and a hell of a lot of fun to play!

This game is just plain FUN! AH crams all the frantic shooting an action junkie (like myself) could want into small environment where timing is key and non stop shooting is the only way to win. The ability to co-op with a friend lets two join the fray and increases the madness while lessening the difficulty. I liked how both of us could individually customize our difficulty levels. This way, one of us wouldn’t immediately be blown away by an insane difficulty level if we weren’t equally skilled. I really wish I could say more about the game itself but there’s not really more to it. You shoot things, it looks great, you have an awesome time.

The biggest problem I had with Alien Hominid is that its short. Alone on medium difficulty, it only took me a little over 7 hours to beat the main game. The multiplayer modes should keep you playing even after you’ve beaten the game, but there really isn’t  a whole lot left after you’ve conquered the main game. There are some extras, but nothing that you won’t loose interest in fairly quickly, especially if you’re not playing with anyone else. If you want this game to last, try to beat it on the hardest difficulty first.

Another problem lies in the game’s difficulty. Even with it’s different modes of difficulty, this game will be extremely frustrating and hard to beat no matter what setting you’re playing on. If you don’t consider yourself an avid gamer or are unsure of how your skills will measure up, you should probably give this one a rent before you end up buying yourself nothing more then an excuse to yell profanities at your TV.

All and all, I had a great time with Alien Hominid. It may not be the most advanced game out there, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in style and sheer fun. If the thought of frenzied side scrolling fun for only $30 peaks your interest, you can’t go wrong picking this one up.

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