Review: Everyone, let’s have a blue goo fight!
Activision has undoubtedly seen gold in Nintendo’s new Game Boy Advance. They have published no less than 11 games in the last year and most of those games have been met with much rejoicing. One of last year's titles was Digital Eclipse’s Alienators: Evolution Continues, an action game packed in with good old style shooting and a load of genetically mutated monsters. As of late, third party development teams seem to rely on other people’s ideas and Digital Eclipse makes no exception. As the game is named after the homonymous TV series, it is easy to deduce where they got the license.
As a player, you assume the role of Ira, captain of a special team of alien fighters called Alienators. As soon as you snuggle the GBA into your hands you take up the hazardous task of clearing a research lab from a horde of dangerously evolved creatures. Your client is the man who provided the scientists of the research center with a sample of Genus – the mutating substance – and is now ready to set an atomic bomb on the base if you don’t take care of the aliens quickly enough. Armed with his trusty Devolver, Ira sets out for this adventure quite light hearted, knowing that his companions Lucy, Wayne and Gassie will provide him with useful information in times of crisis.
Alienators is a well-balanced game. It combines serious action with intricate levels in a wholesome manner and then hypes them with high-level graphics. As the player walks, runs and crawls he will be faced with many different choices as for the path to tread. However, the logic of the labyrinths follows almost always a ramification pattern. Before continuing on the main road one should always take his time exploring deviations in the path. The levels are often divided into areas accessible only by collecting magnetic key cards. The player is thus forced to thoroughly go through each area before entering the next one. This is a criticizable choice that leaves no freedom to the player and can turn out to be rather frustrating considering foes re-spawn every time you exit a room. As a counterbalancing factor, Digital Eclipse has made sure to entertain the player with loads of gunfire: Ira’s weapon rack is of considerable size and needs to call on all of it during his adventure. The protagonist can fire in all 8 directions, from every position. He can also handle his rifles with ease even when climbing a ladder or hanging from an iron bar. This is the kind of things that can always come in handy when dealing with genetically mutated beasts.
Alienators sports 12 stages packed with monsters, and makes the obvious but boring choice of locating 10 of them in the depths of the forsaken lab. The scenarios are therefore not all that varied, and soon the player gets bored of the repetitiveness of the backgrounds. The remaining two stages are the first and final one that, as one can imagine, are placed in the surroundings of the research center. If you seek relief from the dullness of the inside stages, you will be disappointed to find out that the external stages are very much as drab. At least the weapons offer some more variance through Blue Goo Grenades, a Rapid-Fire Attachment, Rocket-Propelled Goo, a Shampoo Thrower Attachment and a Super Sludge Attachment. The choice of weapon will soon depend on how often one can find ammo for each type of gun as only the basic Blue Goo Thrower has infinite power. It is wise to save the most rare of bullets as Ira will need more than the basic goo to defeat the bosses. Speaking of which, there are no less than 8 of them that will attempt to bar Ira’s way to Scope, the mastermind behind this whole invasion and also a character in the TV-series.
In general, the graphics are nice, neat and smooth. Their only flaw is their inaccuracy. Monsters are repellent as expected but are also lacking personality and animation. The same, of course, goes for Ira, who has few movements and some of them are on the brink of ridiculous – e.g. he crawls with the grace of a crippled monkey.
