This is my first article in English, so please be patient ;)
As many of you knows, cooperative mode can make a great improvement in gameplay even when the whole game is really boring or dumb. The main reason of why this is happening is that we still better spend our time with other people. Therefore MMO's and offline titles with co-op mode are so popular today.
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| Not so bad |
The first thing that you mark in "Alien Breed" is that it looks very familiar, when you are an experienced player in this sort of games. The scenes are really like "Shadowgrounds" - with pipes, burning things here and there, electronic double doors and computers everywhere. The main difference is that the story of "Alien Breed" takes place on a spaceship, that had impacted into another ship and... different monsters begin to appear everywhere, killing everyone on their way. The plot's only purpose is to explain the appearance of new markers on the minimap. "AB" could be one game for ten buks, but is separated into 3 episodes, each with its little part of story, and this is not so bad, because you don't need to pay the full price to understand the amount of your wish to play it (There is demo too). The first episode name is "Impact".
Gameplay is something between "Shadowgrounds" and "Space Siege". We explore the interiors of the full-of-dead-people ship with almost no hope to find someone alive, sometimes floor and walls crashing - and scary beings start to attack from one or all directions simultaneously, then we grab some loot from lockers or "human corpses" and continue our journey. All the time we move from battle to battle, trying to hear enemies. In "Dead Space" sound was the main key to divine a fight, here it just sounds, someone always sniffs and "coughs" somewhere. The most interesting thing in this mess is that we must pay to gain ammo and upgrades from "Intex terminals". Yeah, savior of the world "has not enough money to buy a potion". What a delusion. But there is something in this end of the spaceship days. Enemies are tough, ammo ends very quickly, we saw this in "Shadowgrounds" once, and that was good, but again with the same monsters with just one upgrade per gun and absolutely same grey locations, this will kill even the biggest fan of isometric shoot-em-all horror games. Sometimes the game shows the power of "Unreal Engine 3", painting great effects of electricity or a new style of environment like chambers with dark-green plants and alien cocoons in hydroponics, and sometimes it seems that a new part of the ship is “a breath of fresh air”. But there is almost no fun in killing brownish-gray aliens in brownish-gray environment.
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| Just don't forget to cover your teammate |
When solo campaign is boring and monotonous, co-op is... even worst. There are no boss-fights except big hordes of enemies, the final trial in each mission is to defend yourself against a horde of monsters for 30 seconds and then fast jump into the elevator. The only thing that can fix this and prevent yawning is your friend on the other side of the global network. I've played many co-op games and surely can tell, that there are no reasons to play "AB" together. You can't interact with each other, can't exchange weapons and items, you can't even help your partner when he is down - he will stand up automatically. The two heroes are even nameless. The one thing that you can do is to try to cover your friend's back, shoot monsters on his 6 and survive while he raises up after being down. Nothing more.
There are actually no players in co-op now, because most of people who bought this game had played it already, and the replayability of it is very low, so i found a partner with great complication. Anyway, thanks to man Fuze from France for being a good partner in completing this game. I believe we will continue trough the next parts, but only because of the good party.
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| This doors blow on every level |
"Alien Breed" brings nothing new in genre, trying to scare you, but it's not scary, except the moments, where enemies start to rise from the floor under your character. I'm sorry, i don't like to bind labels, because every game has it's fans and creating of any game is not so easy, but this game is boring, and there is no reason to play it more than once, even once.
P.S. Thanks to Lord Altair (editors spelling saved) for fixing obvious errors and making a good thing from this “me playing co-op” article.
