Here’s a riddle for you. What do you get when you take a dungeon crawler and remove the two most important aspects of the genre, namely the feeling of empowerment when leveling up, and the promise of epic loot? One answer is that you get an uninspired chore of a game. The other, although similar answer is that you get Alien Syndrome, Sega and Totally Games’ update of the 80’s arcade title of the same name.
Alien Syndrome places you in the boots of Aileen Harding, an Earth Command Trooper, who is called to Seti Alpha V (no, you’re not imagining things, it’s a direct rip-off of Star Trek II) to investigate the abrupt lack of human contact. Once you’re there, it’s up to you to travel through one bland level after another, fighting the same aliens over and over again until ultimately you reach the exit so that you can start another level and do it all over again.
Combat is handled via the Wiimote and Nunchuk, and when dealing with ranged enemies, it works extremely well. You use the Wiimote to place the crosshair on the alien to be dispatched and fire with the B button. Alternatively, a second weapon can me mapped to the A button to mix things up a bit. Character movement is done via the thumbstick on the Nunchuk which gives Aileen a lot of freedom to move in one direction and shoot in another. This works particularly well when circle strafing as keeping the crosshair on the target is very easy.
Melee is another matter entirely, using combinations of motion sensing and the Wiimote to deliver a staff-based smackdown to the alien threat. The motion controls are unresponsive and sluggish, and this reviewer couldn’t pull off a finishing move regardless of what combination of Nunchuk and Wiimote shaking was employed. Due to the unresponsiveness of the controls, melee ends up just being an opportunity to get killed and respawn from one of the game’s many checkpoints, only to have to repeat your progress. As a result, you end up using just ranged weapons to mow down enemies, severely limiting the death dealing variety.
Moving from level to level and fighting waves and waves of enemies is nothing new to dungeon crawlers, in fact that pretty much defines the dungeon crawling experience, however it’s what you get for your efforts that makes it worthwhile, or in Alien Syndrome’s case, what you don’t get, that causes the biggest complaints. Simply put, there’s no feeling of progression as you level up and the loot drops are nothing to get excited about.
When starting the game, you pick Aileen’s “profession” from five pre-built character classes which provide different combinations of character traits such as endurance, strength and accuracy as well as a focus on a particular style of weapons. Leveling up allows you to increase Aileen’s stats as well as spend skill points to either increase Aileen’s focus on a particular weapon style or open up new weapon styles. On paper it sounds good, but in practice it falls short. First of all, there are only four weapon styles, and from a gameplay perspective, there’s not much difference between shooting an alien with a laser weapon and shooting them with a projectile weapon. The flamethrower is fun, and nice for laying down a constant stream of damage, but it too becomes boring after a while. Placing skill points to increase focus on one weapon style allows you to do more damage with weapons of that style, and unlocks additional weapons, however there may be four or five game levels between when you unlock your shiny new destructive implement and when you find one or can purchase one. As a result, leveling up doesn’t give the player the feeling that Aileen is getting any better.
Loot is also handled with a method that sounds great until you actually have to use it. Aileen is accompanied on her mission by a SCARAB, a floating robot that not only provides some level of additional firepower, but who can craft items using resource points. Most enemies drop something, either items that can be scrapped for resource points, or resource points themselves, so Aileen is never strapped for cash, and with a floating World O’ Guns with her, you’d think that Aileen would want for nothing. Well, you’d be wrong.
