Review: Alien Hominid HD (Arcade) (360)

It’s safe to say that the Xbox Live Arcade lately has hardly lived up to its potential. Nintendo have constantly fed us classic games, but Microsoft seem to only give us one a week (if we're lucky) and even then they're 80's retro games that will be played once and then abandoned. We want games like Castlevania and Sonic the Hedgehog - not Galaga and Pac-Man - and where are the original games from the small developers that we were promised? Just as we were starting to give up on the XBLA, Microsoft revealed that March would be the best month ever for the Live Arcade and then following that Alien Hominid HD quickly turned up. A game we have been feverishly waiting for, but was it worth the wait?

The short answer would be - no. Being gamers for as long as we can remember; we've played many games where the difficulty is ramped up to extreme (see Ikaruga and most other scrolling shooters), but in such titles at least you know how you died. In Alien Hominid you'll constantly see your little alien person flying backwards dead because you couldn't actually see a bullet, or something happened that was unavoidable. This is not making the game a challenge, it is a glaringly obvious design flaw. Bullets flicker on and off screen, enemies come from out of nowhere (mostly landing on top of you) and the power ups for your gun provide such huge bullets that you can't see what's going on - cue you blindly hammering the shoot button in the hope of killing things.

The Behemoth seem to have masked this bad gameplay with some delightfully colourful graphics. They're so beautiful in fact (particularly in HD) that most people will purchase the game (800 points) just to gawp at them. The cartoon world is packed with subtle touches and the blood from your fallen foes along with them clutching their wounds make the game, at the very least, entertaining to watch. Playing it though is enough to make you put a fork through your eye.

On the plus side you are given plenty of lives, but the majority of these will be wasted on the opening level. Mostly thanks to the awful end of level bosses. Here's a tip for the developer, giving the boss a pattern to exploit like most old school side scrolling games is no use when you're constantly being interrupted by minions who kill you in an instant. Due to the lack of lives you'll be left with at the end of each level, your best chance of survival would be to quit out, go to the load level menu and choose the level you just unlocked so you start with all your lives again. It hardly makes the game flow.

We tried our hardest to like Alien Hominid, after all it is a game we have been eagerly awaiting, and there was a point during the game where we did start enjoying it. That would be the section where you abandoned the ground and jumping into our spaceship flying and shooting towards the heavens. It's the only part of the game where you don't feel like you've been cheated when you explode. On top of that we did enjoy the unique humour and music.

Alien Hominid HD almost makes us want to cry. Maybe it's because a game we've been looking forward too has turned out to be incredibly average or perhaps it's because we've very rarely been this overcome by a games unfair difficulty. Either way, it may be best to save your Microsoft points and purchase Worms. Now that's guaranteed to be a far more fun experience.

Rating: 5 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver