Review:
Alien Breed: Impact

Backtrack back to 1993, when the first game in the Alien Breed series was ported from Amiga to MS-DOS. Now, fastforward to 1996 when a grand total of 3 sequels have been published for the Alien Breed series. If you fastforward another year, that's when I first completed all the original Alien Breed games.

The Alien Breed games are a series of top-down shooters based in their own little sci-fi world, with it's roots firmly in the Aliens movies. The premise is simple: You are the protagonist, you are on a ship infested with ravenous aliens, you have guns, the aliens are in your way. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what to do next.

In this latest game you take the role of Theodore J, Conrad, a man that I could only refer to as Gruff McHardass whilst I was playing. They seem to have taken every stereotype they could without making the man a full-blown space marine and jammed it into his character design. He's tall, muscular, bald, wears black googles on his forehead, smokes, has facial scarring, always scowls, carrys a gun everywhere and has the gruffest voice I've heard for a character in the last 5 years.

The setting followed Alien Breed's formula, only this time it was my own ship that was infested with aliens and now I had better guns. 

No. I give up. I'm attempting to dodge a point by explaining the game in detail. I could not bring myself to enjoy Alien Breed: Impact even in the slightest. Once I'd installed it I jumped straight into the Elite difficulty settings only to be bored by how unerringly simple this game was. Simple games can be some of the most difficult but Alien Breed: Impact was just predictable and easy no matter what difficult I played it on.

Possibly just to annoy me, the game's starting cutscene was glitched. Freezing every three seconds for a tiny fraction of time, only just noticeable enough to be annoying.

The game's narrative explained nothing, leaving me as the player somewhat out of the loop as I mindlessly led Gruff McHardass from objective to objective with little to no idea of why I had to go to each objective or what they did. This left my very detached from the game, and I couldn't get engrossed in what I was doing because of it. The objectives bothered me as well. I'd get to one objective to find out that the door was broken for whatever reason and that I'd need a new part to fix it, but instead of having to search for the new part the game would highlight exactly where it was. This is not good level design. This is a point and click adventure game with my targets highlighted.