Alien Rage Review

By Lance Muddiman on 29/04/2024 21:50 UTC

Developed and published by CI Games, Alien Rage is a sci-fi first-person shooter that takes place on an asteroid known as Deimos 875 in the year 2242 AD.

An asteroid named Deimos 875 had been drifting through space for billions of years before being discovered by a probe in the year 2230 AD which was one of many sent out by humans to find a precious chemical element known as promethium which Deimos 875 contains quite a lot of. Three years later, humans landed on the asteroid in ships then began settling there over time, building structures and harvesting the promethium. Three more years later, an alien race known as the Vorus arrived on the asteroid and wanting a share of the promethium as well. The humans and aliens cooperated for a while, but something changed and they began to go to war with each other in the year 2242 AD.

First off, I noticed the game uses Unreal Engine 3 so I went to where the configuration files are and opened them to discover that they're encrypted. This may be a problem for some people as the engine's configuration files have things which can be customized such as the field of view, frame rate smoothing, graphics settings, mouse smoothing, and more. A similar issue occurred with the game named Bulletstorm, but someone later found a way to decrypt the files for customization and then encrypt them again.

Now, I am a fan of fast-paced shooters, but I had at least a few issues with this game even though I was having a bit of fun with it as well.

From the start of the campaign, the game displays text on the screen showing most of the controls including the ability to sprint and slide. Killing enemies earns the player score and there are medals for getting head shots among other things which earn bonus score. With all these medals popping up with a voice yelling things like "Both barrels!", "Head shot!" and "Triple kill!" It's like the game is trying to be Unreal Tournament or something. The score can be used to unlock player perks such as extending the ammo in a weapon's clip or increasing the amount of damage that a weapon can cause.

There is automatically regenerating health, but there are certain situations in the game due to bad level design where the player is mostly out in the open with multiple enemies running towards them while shooting at them and there is no way to heal other than to run away and hide somewhere to wait for the health to regenerate. Situations like these have been frustrating as there is an enemy type which can get up close to the player and stun them which leaves them vulnerable to being hit and quite possibly dying. For a game that promotes being a fast-paced shooter, an automatically regenerating health system does not work out too well especially when there is no other way of healing.

There really isn't that much to the story in this game. The player character communicates with some female computer AI and another guy, but they mostly to talk about the mission objectives. The only real story that can be heard in the game is through the audio logs which can be found in each level.

6.5

“Generic”

Overall, this game has just been really frustrating to me. I was dying quite a lot especially during the parts when I was trying to take cover to regenerate my health and then like 4 or more enemies would come rushing over to where I was taking cover and killed me. I was having some fun with the few different weapons in the game to shoot at the enemies, though.

Story70%
Gameplay60%
Graphics70%