3/5 ★ – benhmedia's review of ALIEN XENOBLASTER.

I really appreciate the recent indie-led renaissance of 80s arcade-style games popping up, but this one doesn’t live up to the standards of Annalynn or Donut Dodo for me. There’s just too much about it that got on my nerves. My smallest of complaints is with sound design: there isn’t much indication for when you get hurt. Your character blinks a few times but there’s no sound effect, or even a flinch animation, for when they do. The game also very blatantly uses the Mario pipe sound for enemies coming out of pipes. I don’t even care about the legality of it, it just feels lazy. At least the music is competent, and often quite catchy. A slightly larger complaint is the story and its sense of humor: it’s immature in a Seth Rogen kind of way and I’ll just leave it at that. But I don’t play 80s/80s-inspired arcade games for plot, so that can be mostly ignored if the gameplay is good. What’s most disappointing about Alien Xenoblaster’s faults is that the gameplay is often quite fun. I was having a good time throughout much of my play through for the main campaign, but I just couldn’t bring myself to continue past the toxic waste area. The difficulty spike once you hit those levels is so insane that even getting past the first one was a major pain for me. Some might laugh this off with a “get gud” comment, but I’m usually very competent with platformers like these. There just comes a point for me where something gets way too tedious to be fun. Aside from the toxic waste levels, there was a very annoying boss fight in the Egyptian tomb area that, while certainly beatable, could have been balanced out a bit. I was thinking of giving this a 5/10, but I’ll give it an extra point for variety. While other games in this genre are generally more fun to play, I’ll give this one credit for having a greater variety in gameplay modes. There’s unique challenge levels that allow you to unlock other playable characters, including Annalynn from the aforementioned arcade indie game, and Peppino from Pizza Tower. There’s also an arcade mode which is a more scaled-back version of the campaign. I always appreciate gameplay variety and bonus modes within games like these. In this way, Alien Xenoblaster does deliver. With the game being just $5 on Steam, I can’t complain too much about not loving this. All things considered you get a fair amount of gameplay for what you pay. It’s just so unfortunate how close this game is to being wonderful, but enough small things bring it down for me where I can’t see myself coming back to it.