Grab The Games: Alien Rage - Unlimited

 A mediocre shooter that tries to imitate what so many have done before it, but ultimately fails to deliver, though it did make me angry.

As you can tell from that first sentence my playthrough of Alien Rage Unlimited wasn't satisfactory at all. On top of the clich characters, storyline and poor attempts at making me care about what was going on at the time, I was met with a mediocre shooter which might as well have been Call of Duty for the innovation it delivered.

Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh on COD, at least I enjoyed the COD series.

Let's look at the story first shall we. We've all heard it before. Humanity goes to space, finds out it got a little too big for its boots and ends up getting its ass handed to it by technologically superior aliens which just seem to want to stomp all over our freedom parade.

The opening narration gives me some boring talk about a mining facility I'm supposed to be blowing up and since I've not got an army, or at least a strike team behind me, I'm going to assume my character was the only one who showed up for work that day.

So it's a one man assault on an alien controlled facility. It's something we've seen plenty of times before in modern gaming. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if it actually delivered something new that hadn't been done before but as a small game with no huge backing behind it, it can only do so much.

Right off the bat the game didn't have me interested. This is a theme that carried on throughout my playthrough.

The shooting mechanics are competent and work well. They're your basic shooter mechanics though so it's hard to do them wrong. Shoot to make things die, if things shoot you too much your screen goes red, hide and wait for your eyes to stop bleeding before repeating the process. It gets quite tedious after hiding from the fifth group of enemies.

The weaponry was another let down that had its chance to impress me, but just failed. The only real change is instead of two weapons you can carry three, but the third has to be your pistol.

Weaponry is usually something I look forward to in a scifi alien shooter game. It gives developers a chance to really experiment with how crazy some alien technology can get and really push the boat out. In this we just get some ion versions of the standard assault rifle, shotgun, pistol etc. There's almost no imagination there.

The game could have impressed me in some areas but there's just hardly any imagination when it comes to the alien foes we fight. They're just faceless drones for you to slaughter en masse with nothing really defining. You could change them to dinosaur wielding proton packs and it wouldn't make the game much different.

In summary: The game is quite uninspired. The story is bland, characters are clich with no qualities to them, the enemies are boring, the guns are boring and the multiplayer mode only serves as a distraction for a few moments while you laugh with a friend about how boring the game is.

If you're looking for a generic shooter to pass the time it could serve some purpose but if you're looking for anything deep, it's not here.

5/10

Pros:

The game looks nice

Shooting controls are competent

Laughing about it with a friend can kill time

Cons:

No depth

Boring and overdone story

Boring characters

Boring weapons

Too many missed opportunities for fun

Nathan Dack