Budget games often have an almost unfair stigma about them, as many gamers who don't know about the title beforehand associate the low price with equally low production values and move on down the row. It's not that they have better or worse ideas for gameplay than their big-budget brethren, but rather that smaller development studios simply don't have the resources to make your standard A-list title and must price their releases accordingly. Alien Shooter: Vengeance, with its asking price of a whole twenty bones, is in fact a budget title but at the same time the quality level is more comparable to titles with twice the price.

Alien Shooter: Vengeance is probably most easily described as an isometric action RPG set about a hundred years in the future. Through the coupling of both scientific might and humanity's undying greed and lust for power a company called M.A.G.M.A. Energy Corporation has inadvertently opened portals inside of its facilities from which hordes of unidentified creatures have begun pouring forth and taking over both the facilities themselves and the surrounding wilderness. The player takes the role of a mercenary called upon by General Baker, leader of the military response to the new threat, to essentially clean up the M.A.G.M.A. facilities and put a stop to the alien threat.

Starting off in Alien Shooter: Vengeance the player must first choose from one of eight mercenaries, four male and four female. Each character varies in their starting equipment and stats, and generally speaking it is wise to pick a character that more suits your intended playing style. The stats each character has are health, strength, speed, accuracy, intelligence, special, and your proficiency in wearing armor. Your character also has separate skill levels for using pistols, shotguns, machine guns, explosive, and power/fire weapons. Most of the stat types are fairly self explanatory; strength contributes to both how much you can carry and adds a small amount to your health while speed determines how quickly your character can run.

The special stat is the skill level of your character's special ability which you choose right at the start. These abilities range from the fairly useless (such as the ability to be a better melee fighter. Yes, using your fists against hundreds of aliens at once is a bad idea.) to the almost incredibly useful (such as regenerative health). By increasing the special stat, you increase the overall power of your ability, making your ability a little less useless in the case of the former and making your health regenerate at a faster rate in the latter.

There is a fairly large variety of weapons and items in the game to equip your character with. Starting off, your character only has access to weak pistols and shotguns, a small flashlight to illuminate your path, and mere leather body armor. As the game progresses better weapons and armor, which require a higher skill level to use, become available for purchase at the shop terminals found before or right at the beginning of most levels. For instance, to use a fairly meager Colt .45 that does 3-4 damage per shot you'll only need a few points in your pistol skill, whereas to wield the almost legendary Desert Eagle you will need a much more significant contribution to your pistol skill. Increasing your weapon skill also increases the minimum damage rating for that particular type, so if a machine gun does 60-75 damage per shot if you increase your skill it will bump up to do 70-75 per shot and make it more effective.

You receive quite a few points to allocate to your character's stats right at the beginning of the game during character selection, but to gain more you must gain enough experience by killing aliens and completing objectives to level up your character. To do so, you must venture forth into all manners of darkly lit corridors and rooms filled to the brim with creatures that want to do little more than figure out what flavor you are. Control in the game is both simple and intuitive with the WSAD keys controlling your characters movement on screen and your mouse controlling where it is your character is aiming at. The mouse wheel allows you to quickly toggle between your equipped weapons (you can equip one weapon of each class), and if you find yourself for some reason wanting to toggle off your flashlight you can do so with the F key. There are a few nuances to keep in mind while moving about to make things a little less mindless, such as how if you are aiming to the right but walking to the left your character walks a good deal more slowly as they backpedal away. Sometimes, when you shine your light into a doorway and see nothing but hundreds of skittering angels of death in the room, the better part of valor is aiming away and running like hell to a better fighting position.

Whether or not you choose to fight from the relative seclusion of a doorway and let the mass of aliens come to your or if you stand your ground in the middle of the room, one thing you will never find yourself in need of as you play Alien Shooter: Vengeance is more things to shoot at. At the beginning of the game you'll fire your trusty starting pistol against a small handful of small spidery creatures at a time, while near the end of the game you'll be literally mowing hundreds of aliens down with a minigun. The aliens themselves range in size and type from the afore-mentioned spider-like creatures to larger ones that spray clouds of acid and even larger ones that come equipped with laser cannons and shoulder-mounted missile racks. While at the beginning of the game you can pretty much just backpedal down the hallway as you spray firepower at the advancing waves of aliens, near the end the difficulty is upped as you are tasked with dodging clouds of acid, pools of toxic chemicals, projectiles spat from flying creatures, and shooting down or dodging homing missiles.