Even the saltiest of side-scrolling veterans will be hard-pressed to finish the game with the number of continues allotted, but the game keeps things manageable. You can occasionally score a protective force field that will absorb one shot before dissipating, but without it you're naked to the world, and one hit will leave you with one less life. Like the side-scrolling shoot-'em-ups from which the game takes its inspiration, Alien Hominid is really, really hard. The game is also extremely fond of throwing powerful bosses at you, and each of its 16 levels is fitted with several, all of whom will give your reflexes a good test. There are several levels where you'll actually recover your spaceship for a short time, which changes the action entirely, and is quite fun in its own right. You'll regularly find vehicles you can drive, ranging from civilian automobiles to earth movers to a giant, vengeance-filled Sasquatch (our personal favorite), and there's something absolutely gleeful about just plowing through your enemies with these. But the best moments in Alien Hominid are when it moves away from the basic gameplay. The core action is pretty satisfying, and anyone who grew up in Cold War times will probably get a perverse, irony-tinged thrill out of crushing the "Red Menace" in the game's middle levels. The game is available for both the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, and it's identical on both systems. In most areas you can also dig into the ground and lie in wait until an enemy strolls by, at which point you can pull him under for a nice sneaky kill (this tactic is also useful for dodging otherwise undodgeable barrages). You can also leap on top of many of the basic enemies, and either bite their heads off for a quick, gory kill, or pick them up and chuck them at their allies.
You can use the shoulder buttons to perform quick rolls to the right or the left, which are good for dodging bullets and getting up close and personal with the enemy. Your directives are straightforward-run from the left to the right, shooting or throwing grenades at anything that moves, and avoiding incoming attacks as best you can-though Alien Hominid makes some unique contributions to the classic side-scrolling shoot-'em-up formula. Over the course of the game, you'll have to cut a swath through a seemingly endless number of FBI agents, KGB operatives, and Area 51 spooks, and do battle with a butterscotch monster, a variety of giant robots, and even one of your own before you'll get what you want. But rather than charging you with destroying some weird giant heart-monster or taking down a Hussein-esque dictator, as those games do, Alien Hominid puts you in the role the titular character, who just wants to get his (its?) spaceship back from the FBI.
The action in Alien Hominid is pure throwback-nostalgia-prone gamers in their 20s will probably be reminded of Contra most immediately, though the game definitely owes a greater debt to the humor, breakneck pacing, and extreme challenge of SNK's unkillable Metal Slug series.
While its gameplay design may appear to be derivative, there truly isn't anything else quite like Alien Hominid on consoles today.įrom the Web to your console, it's been an interesting trip for Alien Hominid.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's With a surplus of charm and a tried-and-true side-scrolling shoot-'em-up design, Alien Hominid gained loads of momentum on the Web, which has allowed for the unlikely crossover to the PlayStation 2 and GameCube. has for years been a forum for no-budget Web-based gaming and animation, and it's where Alien Hominid, the debut game from the independent development studio The Behemoth, began its life. But original 2D gaming is thriving on the Web, thanks in no small part to the Macromedia Flash platform and amateur artists and programmers with lots of time on their hands. This isn't exactly the forum for getting into the how and why, but it's also a fact that this focus has allowed the art form of 2D graphics to fall by the wayside-at least within the big business of console gaming. Here's a fact: Console gaming is a technology-driven business.
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