A Review: Alien Carnage, DOS 1993
Alien Carnage, originally released as Halloween Harry, is a side-scrolling shooter/platformer that puts the player in the role of a soldier tasked with saving the world from aliens that want to turn all of Earth's population into zombies. This game features 256-color VGA graphics and background music in the MOD format. The plot is broken into four separate episodes, with the first being released to the public as a shareware version and the remaining episodes being available to buy. In 2007, John Passfield and 3D Realms released the game fully as freeware, and in 2014, the game was re-released with modern Windows support. In 1996, a sequel called Zombie Wars was released and did fairly well for itself, with a plot that follows three years after this game's story. Gee-Whiz Entertainment (formerly Interactive Binary Illusions) announced plans to make this game and Zombie Wars into an animated series, but nothing ever came of it.
I found this game to be a nice, simple thing to play, and I enjoyed going through it. Play was so simple that you could get to grips with the game in under an hour and be something of a master within four. Completing the story was easy, and the objectives were clear and simple to accomplish. I liked the constant style of action and the variety of guns and weapon types. The comedy was a little cheesy and didn't age so well, but it was still worth a laugh. I get that this game is nothing amazing or standout awesome, but I still like to load it up every now and then because of the simplicity I mentioned earlier. It was nice to open up a game that didn't require me to think hard to play, and sometimes you really need that when other games can be so heavy. I will say that the level designs were sometimes frustrating, and having to backtrack so much was annoying if you wanted to find everything on a level. Sometimes the enemy would get stuck inside walls too, which was aggravating against the bosses, and I would have liked a checkpoint feature too. Otherwise, I feel that this game is a fairly solid example of a shooter/platformer game, and I did enjoy playing through it.
Visually, I liked the simple, cartoony style of the graphics. The colours popped nicely, and the characters and enemies looked pretty cool for this type of game. The weapons, explosions, and usage animations were nice, and I liked the individual look of the different ammos and items. The interface was a little intrusive, I thought, and I would have preferred a counter for my ammo rather than a sliding scale. The interactibles looked cool, and I liked the vending machine styling that was chosen. I also liked the visual pop culture references throughout and found some of them to be quite humorous.
Overall, I liked this game and found it fun to play.
5/10 – Okay!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ
I found this game to be a nice, simple thing to play, and I enjoyed going through it. Play was so simple that you could get to grips with the game in under an hour and be something of a master within four. Completing the story was easy, and the objectives were clear and simple to accomplish. I liked the constant style of action and the variety of guns and weapon types. The comedy was a little cheesy and didn't age so well, but it was still worth a laugh. I get that this game is nothing amazing or standout awesome, but I still like to load it up every now and then because of the simplicity I mentioned earlier. It was nice to open up a game that didn't require me to think hard to play, and sometimes you really need that when other games can be so heavy. I will say that the level designs were sometimes frustrating, and having to backtrack so much was annoying if you wanted to find everything on a level. Sometimes the enemy would get stuck inside walls too, which was aggravating against the bosses, and I would have liked a checkpoint feature too. Otherwise, I feel that this game is a fairly solid example of a shooter/platformer game, and I did enjoy playing through it.
Visually, I liked the simple, cartoony style of the graphics. The colours popped nicely, and the characters and enemies looked pretty cool for this type of game. The weapons, explosions, and usage animations were nice, and I liked the individual look of the different ammos and items. The interface was a little intrusive, I thought, and I would have preferred a counter for my ammo rather than a sliding scale. The interactibles looked cool, and I liked the vending machine styling that was chosen. I also liked the visual pop culture references throughout and found some of them to be quite humorous.
Overall, I liked this game and found it fun to play.
5/10 – Okay!
Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ
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