Alien Rage – E3 Hands On Preview

Tramping over the mountain of sci-fi titles due out over the next 12 months, developer City Interactive have ignored what is becoming standard, weighty, space-opera dramatics in favour of beefing up the bullets; parading Alien Rage as a short, snappy old-school styled shooter.

Alien Rage

Landing in a dark docking bay typically filled with crates, pipes and brushed steel walls that bounced with flashes of red and yellow once the firing started, Alien Rage got straight to the point after a minimal yet terribly hammy exchange between its Special Forces protagonists;

“Okay! Get in, poke around, pull out, no heroics.”
“Sounds like your idea of a perfect date.”

Before I had time to tut and roll my eyes, the first of many steely angular-armoured aliens rounded the corner in a fury. Heavily inspired by Quake, this is one challenging but satisfying hardcore FPS arcade experience (no easy/novice or even normal difficulty modes are on offer here). Forget nimbly crouching in and out of cover, tactically forward planning complex manoeuvres, listening to emotional, moral conversations or working on complex puzzles; Alien Rage is simply designed to test the very best trigger fingers. With 14 tough levels to battle through, each with a barrage of giant alien forces hell-bent on taking me down, the key to a high score was in trying to find a balance between steadily picking off the enemy with headshots and ploughing through the dozens of bodies whilst not exposing myself to attack. Only those with quick reactions, a keen eye and a load of noisy, hot weapons will succeed. There are 10 weapons available, each with two firing modes, all of which will be needed at some point in the battle against the 21 enemy types including infantry, warriors, flying drones and spiders, all of whom are massive.

Alien Rage

Death and the inevitable respawn was a relatively rapid affair and I quickly learnt that sometimes pacing myself and picking off the most deadly or difficult aliens whilst waiting for the sweet moment to blow up the majority of foes with a gas barrel just before they flanked or attacked, got me a lot further than mindlessly running and gunning. There's hardly room for complacency through. It has an addictive arcade-core combined with some impressive graphics, weighty gun action, and does indeed rage in pace and tone in a way that has grabbed, nay demands the larger part of my attention. Alien Rage delivers a true arcade experience as zooming in down the sights, the most thrilling element was watching my score ring up as skill shots, head shots and accuracy were heavily rewarded. Whilst entering my initials on the end game leaderboard, I couldn’t help wishing I could have just one more go as my heart was still thumping, so am already looking forward to Alien Rage’s release on PSN, XBLA and PC later this year.

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