You can probably guess where this is going by now. Turns out
that this ghost ship is the home of an alien swarm, one which quickly infests
your smaller ship, which itself has been heavily damaged. So it's up to you to
set out and repair the damage, bringing various systems back online, so that
your ship can break free before the two are pulled into a nearby planet. Of
course the aliens don't make that easy, tunneling out of holes in the floor to
charge at you, and generally make your life difficult. Thankfully, you're yet
another engineer that has a profound efficiency with firearms, joining
the ranks of other inexplicable nerdy heroes like Isaac Clark or Gordon
Freeman.
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| Apparently, even being an engineer, you can't figure out how to not push the wrong buttons. |
An android by the name of Mia will guide you in your quest
to correct the situation, letting you know where you next objective is located.
Often times levels require you to head to a certain area, to say restart a
generator, but once you get there you find that the door is locked or something
else is broken, and so you end up crisscrossing the level several times to
progress bit by bit. It something that get's a bit annoying after a while, and
if I were actually in a situation like that, and survived, I might just have to
meet the engineer that thought it'd be a great idea to locate the circuit
breaker for an object on the other side of a level, rather than in a
convenient, nearby, spot.
Of course, it doesn't help that there are a large number of
enemies spewing forth from the tunnels they are making through the ship. There
is a variety of enemies, and I suppose they do require a certain amount of
tactical thinking, for example dodging the enemies that charge you, or waiting
to shoot certain enemies until they stop shielding themselves, or targeting the
medics first, but really, I found that the best solution was to just line up my
assault rifle or shotgun on where they were coming from, particularly when
aliens are popping up out of a tunnel one after another, and just fire as they
come up, leading them to die in a group like lemmings over a cliff.
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| And that's how you get big piles of dead enemies. |
There are a small handful of weapons available, such as the
aforementioned assault rifle and shotgun, as well as the always classic
flamethrower, and a few others, like the Ionspike. Unfortunately, some of the
later, and potentially better items, don't become available until much later in
the game, and the limited ammo, or the prohibitively high cost of buying more,
prevented me from really using them. When searching corpses, lockers, or little
nooks you are far more likely to encounter ammo for one of the classic weapons,
or just some money that you can use at the save station/store/upgrade terminal
to buy lots of assault rifle rounds for cheap. There are also weapon upgrades,
limited to the exact same three for each weapon, which impact damage, fire
rate, and reload speed, and while expensive, they are useful, particularly the
increased damaged and the reload rate increase for something like the shotgun.
While you're searching every nook and cranny, either because
you're looking for your next keycard to open a locked door or because you want
to find the secret journal entries, you'll also stumble upon several different
items. This is one way to uncover medical kits, both large and small, grenades,
both frag and stun, as well as a few very nice items like hardened armor or a
turret you can place on specific power points. Besides the medical kits, I
never found myself using the other items much, but there were certainly
situations where there are enough enemies swarming in that they could be
useful.
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| The intex terminals are where you can upgrade weapons or items, purchase ammo, and save the game. So keep an eye out for them, because they are important. |
Overall, the game is pretty mediocre - the guns are blah,
the enemies are much the same, and generally there is nothing that stands out
about it. Even the setting isn't remarkable. To compound the problem even
further, the game ends in a cliff hanger, telling you that the second one will
be available soon. It's a good thing I picked up the whole trilogy for just
under $5, because there is no way I could justify $10 per game, at least not on
this one (coincidently, it would actually be more to buy each game separately
than to just get the trilogy). I put about 6 hours into the game, or roughly 1
hour per level, and that was about the most I could take in one sitting as well,
because after a while just running back and forth got a bit boring, with
enemies ever rarely trying to correct that by, say, attacking from multiple
directions so I couldn't just lay down a line of fire and easily beat them
back, or use tactics like first coming in with the heavily shielded aliens,
backed up by ones that can stun you or heal their buddies. I wouldn't go so far
as to say this is a bad game, but rather, it's not a good one, falling into the
no man's land in the middle. If you still really want to play it, I guess I
would suggest getting the whole trilogy for, hopefully a bit, under $5, though
not having played the other two games, I'm not exactly sure what else you'll
encounter, and given the level of enjoyment I got out of this game, I don't
know when, if ever, I'd get around to playing the rest of them - 5 out of 10.
So, the final breakdown:
Score: 5/10
Suggested Price: $5 for the trilogy
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