Alien Breed - Special Edition '92 (Commodore Amiga)

 

Alien Breed - Special Edition '92 (Commodore Amiga) :

If you owned an Amiga in the early nineties, chances are you had some version of Alien Breed.  I remember everybody talking about it at school, and as I only had a ZX Spectrum at the time, I was a bit jealous of all my Amiga owning friends, as this alien-blasting Gauntlet clone sounded amazing!

Skip forward to the late '90s and I was eventually making enough money that I was able to go to car boot sales and find my very own Amiga, for a lot less cash...and one that came bndled with a copy of  Alien Breed - Special Edition '92!  Finally I'd be able to sample it's brilliant-ness!

And it is indeed quite brilliant.  Maybe not quite as good as Gauntlet, which it clearly takes a lot of inspiration from, but it still holds up fairly well and is certainly fun enough to be a worthy Amiga classic!  Of course, another heavy inspiration is the Alien franchise, which should be obvious as soon as you see the box!

And like those films, the game sees you scurrying around metal corridors, trying to keep enough ammo as you battle the hordes of enemies that are taking over your base/spaceship/whatever...

Health packs, ammo, money...all of these things are required and can be found lying around the place, but a lot of the time they're behind locked doors, so you'll be needing to find keys too, so you can get to all that much needed loot!

Wave after wave of alien scum will do their best to stop you from completing the various goals of your mission, and there's a lot to get through, with this Special Edition coming with an extra 12 missions, including some where you're in the dark and can only see the blueness of the alien beasties eyes (apparently at least, I haven't got far enough to see that yet!)....

If I have any gripes about the game, it's that it can be a bit fiddly to control.  You'll frequently get stuck on some of the scenery, and you'll be wishing that your little marine had eight-way directional shooting, which unfortunately he doesn't.....and this makes the game a lot harder than it feels it should be.  You do get more used to it the more you play, but it definitely takes away from the shine of the rest of the package...

But the game is still atmospheric and groovy enough that you'll forgive it's faults, especially when you hear the Star-Trek-esque door noises, the classic si-fi trope of a female computer voice and the funky title music!  Alien Breed then, is definitely one to play.....just remember that in space, no one can hear the narrator say "Green Marine is about to die!"

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