3.5/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of Alienation.

Boy oh boy, when Alienation clicks, it quite possibly could be one of the greatest top down, twin stick shooters ever made! I have so many thoughts in my head I think it’s best I split them into 2 sections. What I liked and didn’t... What i liked: The game at first feels abit awkward, it took some time to get used to but when it clicked and I learnt where all my special abilities were and I could time my reloads perfectly with the gears of war style system it felt magical, buttery smooth with tight responsive controls, I can not overstate how amazing this game feels in motion. The game is insane, it doesn’t really have great graphics but it has decent enough art design. When the screen fills with 50+ enemies all of different colours and they’re exploding on death, the game becomes an explosion of colour and vibrancy, it looks amazing. And above all else it becomes a cathartic experience. When you’re in the midst of the action and your bobbing and weaving, perfectly swapping your weapons to manage ammo, dodging the enemies return fire (which shifts this game into bullet hell territory) and your just tearing through them, it’s blissful. Twin stick shooters are my bread and butter but no game I’ve played in the genre strikes the balance so well as alienation. What I didn’t like: I played this on my own and it’s a 4 player co-op game, it is clearly designed to have a minimum of 2 players, playing at the same time. The levels were so jam packed full of enemies it’s ludicrous. Even on the lowest difficulty I died over and over again, thankfully there are infinite respawns. It drove me insane that they couldn’t rebalance the game to accommodate for single player. This frustration bled over to the final level which goes against the flow and one death is game over.. I tried a couple times and knew that if I was to beat this final level I’d have to pour hours and hours to master it and I just have too big of a backlog. You can’t even grind yourself to a healthy level buff as enemy level accommodates to your level. The story is super hard to follow, I sort of got the gist of what’s going on it’s pretty simple Alien Invasion blah blah blah but I loved playing it so much I wanted to know every detail and most of the story is in voice over/radio chatter in the midst of the action, it’s super hard to follow. So i stopped trying and just followed my objectives marked on the map. The games sound design is pretty shoddy. The game has a pretty awesome soundtrack kicking off in the background but it’s so quiet it may aswell not be there. As mentioned previously the voices can muddle into the chaos and it’s hard to tell anything apart from another. The level design is insanely bland, it’s abit of a letdown compared to the standard of the gameplay but they just about facilitate areas for hectic, strategic action and that’s all that matters. Memorable they are not. The game at some point since it was released in 2016 has became a sort of live service game with weekly missions and events, changing leaderboards and constantly trying to force multiplayer ideals like people joining games by default. It’s a shame, as if it had another mode to just rebalance the game for single player only I would easily give this game a 4.5-5/5. It’s staying as a 3.5/5 for now but i now know what I want to play co-op next, so who knows I may get that chance and it could shoot up. Nearly perfect. Played on PS4