Alien Shooter 1 Demo - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Alien Shooter is a top down run and gun game where players shoot large amounts of aliens. This recreation in Sven does a fairly good job copying the original game in both gameplay and presentation.

SCMapDB page

Author: Dr.Abc

Date of final release: 2018

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Alien Shooter 1 Demo

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | March 12, 2022 | 4665 characters

    Alien Shooter was an old game I remember playing using the shockwave player on AOL back in the day. Top-down running and gunning game. When I saw there was a map based on it I was extremely excited.

    This map is an attempt to recreate Alien Shooter in Sven, and I have to say it's far better than I would have expected. The setup is pretty simple: fight a bunch of melee-only pitdrones as they swarm out of every room you open- in green-yellow-red ranking order of toughness. The players are given dual handguns for infinite ammo firing, then later a shotgun and minigun. There was ammo for what looked like a rocket launcher and grenade launcher as well, but my teammate and I never found those. Tons of other upgrades, including some armor and health pickups which throw the player over 100. No weapons need to reload, though frustratingly you cannot return to the handguns once you pick up any weapon which requires ammo to use until you run out of ammo. No ammo preservation for you.

    To win, you must find the bomb, place it in a crack in a wall that the aliens seem to be festering from, then run to the exit. I'd say it's easier said than done, but it's actually rather easily done. Much like Alien Shooter itself, the map is fairly straight forward and easy. With two players we easily dominated the map, only dying once apiece, both accidentally to our own bomb. The map does a great job most of the time at making the enemies swarm the player- especially in the last segment right after you get the minigun. There are times, however, where my teammate and I would find ourselves just standing in front of the NPC spawner point executing aliens as they spawn in. It made me feel like the hitmen in Looper who wait for people to be sent from the future for them to kill so they just wait around in a field until their target is appears in front of them and then they just shoot them and carry on. I'd say there were a few too many parts like that in the first half of the map. It's more than made up for in the frantic, constant piling-on of easily-downed enemies that made Alien Shooter so good. Combat is also minorly enhanced with some explosives littered through arenas- I feel like these would have been more satisfying if they didn't only ever seen to do enough damage to kill a couple aliens at a time when just shooting aliens tended to kill them faster. I guess that's why it's called "Alien Shooter" and not "Alien Environmental Damage Doer".

    The map's aesthetic very closely resembles the original game, though with an extra coat of shadows lain atop to give it a bit more of a sheen- the original game was a bit bright and flat looking much of the time. The end result is something that looks very much like Half-Life, while still being recognizable for what it's attempting to accomplish. It's a really smooth blend that I hope the map author is proud of. Using an extremely simple trick that more maps should use the pit drones have glowing eyes which makes them really fun and interesting to look at in the dark.

    One thing my teammate and I were bemoaning was the forced switch to third person. I don't think either of us wanted to play in third person. Now that I've played the map, I don't think it would have lost anything by allowing first person mode. Instead, we have our player models taking up most of the screen while attempting to aim at quickly running aliens. There were more than a few times, especially later on when visibility gets a bit low, that I was just blindly firing into some rooms.

    Overall, I think this is a really solid project that I hope goes back into production some time. I bet this could really fill out 5 maps if there were some changes in environment. If you're looking to play with a friend or have something really fun and action packed on a server rotation, give Alien Shooter a try.

Pros:

• The no reloading weapons was a good touch
• The enemies are really simple but super duper effective, especially in packs as large as the ones at the end
• As far as a recreation of Alien Shooter goes, this is everything I'd hope for.
• Tons of effort went into scripting weapons and pickups, you can tell

Cons:

• Didn't like that you can't reselect the pistols until you run out of other ammo
• Not a fan of when you can see the monsters spawners at work, which is much of the first half of this
• Map gets mazey at times
• If shooting aliens starts to get old you're in deep trouble

Score: 8.6 / 10