There I was in 1992, a full head of hair, my trusty Amiga 500 (a much beloved hand-me down Christmas gift from one of my older brothers) and a copy of Team 17’s Alien Breed. Life, it seemed, wouldn’t get any better than that, though it was also true that I had led a fairly sheltered existence up until that point and my exposure to the superior 16-bit Sega and Nintendo consoles of the time was practically non-existent. Alien Breed was a top down shooter that melded aspects of arcade classics Gauntlet and Smash TV to create what seemed at the time a genuinely scary, highly polished and seriously challenging genre effort that made be proud to be an Amiga owner. It was also true that Alien Breed (at least the first game, anyway) *desperately* wanted to be a licensed adaptation of the Alien movies, to the point that its extra-terrestrial foes looked lifted from the big-screen pretty much entirely.
Alien Breed: 35th Anniversary Collection PS5 Review
Developed by Antstream – the folks behind retro streaming suite Antstream Arcade – the Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection feels like a suitably reverent package that does justice to the Alien Breed series broadly speaking, though it’s also clear that not only have each of the games in the collection aged particularly badly, but it’s also true that the level of curation on offer here is a far cry from the polished compilations put out by the likes of Digital Eclipse.
First though, let’s start with the games themselves. For your hard-earned money, the Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection dishes up Alien Breed, Alien Breed Special Edition ‘92, Alien Breed 2, Alien Breed Tower Assault, Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D 2: The Killing Grounds. Put simply, if you consider yourself an Alien Breed mega-fan from the Commodore Amiga era, this collection has your back with every core 16-bit series entry to date in one handy, fairly budget-friendly package. However, this collection does not include any of the later Alien Breed titles, such as Alien Breed Evolution or Alien Breed 2: Assault, which is a touch disappointing.
Starting with the original Alien Breed, it’s a top down shooter where you must proceed from level to level, laying waste to legions of the titular beasts, collecting credits, ammo, health packs and then keys to access areas that could not be accessed otherwise. As you might expect, you can also purchase upgrades for your default automatic firearm too, though it’s also quite apparent that Alien Breed is a pretty challenging endeavour with enemies spawning out of the floor at a moments notice, making the whole affair feel much more pressured than one might expect.
The bigger problem however, is simply that Alien Breed just hasn’t aged well at all, and if I had a little more awareness of other games at the time all the way back in 1992 (I was barely 11 years old then), I would have also realised that it just doesn’t stack up against the games that have clearly influenced it. Indeed, when compared to both Gauntlet and Smash TV, which I would argue are its closest design touchstones, Alien Breed’s sluggish player movement, poor framerate (this collection does little to improve on these games technically – which I’ll get to shortly) and generally unsatisfying level design and gunplay all make the series inaugural debut feel like a pale of imitation of better things, both in terms of its immediate peers in the games industry and in its desperation to be a carbon copy of the second Aliens movie.
Though Alien Breed Special Edition ‘92 does make a number of meaningful improvements by doubling the number of levels, making player movement more responsive and introducing new ‘dark missions’ where you only see the eyes of your enemies, it also still remained very much the same game at its core and a far cry from the much better top-down shooters that players of the 16-bit consoles of that era were already enjoying.
While Alien Breed 2 meanwhile does improve on the visual side of things over its predecessor – particularly with the AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) version which is also available in this collection – it does also feel like a step back with just an insanely high level of difficulty and top-down shooter gameplay which still falls short of what Sega and Nintendo were pulling off on their systems.
For my money however, at least in terms of the 2D games available in this package, Alien Breed: Tower Assault is arguably the best of the lot. Not only could you shoot while walking backwards (huzzah!), but the greatly improved visuals and level design together with an actual narrative threaded throughout the thing made Alien Breed: Tower Assault quite enjoyable indeed and that’s a fact that still remains very much true today as well – even if the game is harder than a pack of frozen turds.
The 3D games in this collection, Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D 2: The Killing Grounds, certainly represent the nadir of the whole enterprise. Though both titles offer up a surprising amount of atmosphere in their claustrophobic corridors along with a scarcity of ammo and health resources which make them more challenging than they perhaps should be, there are insurmountable technical and presentation hurdles which consign them to the dustbin. DOOM, these games most certainly are not.
For a start, these games seemingly run through as-is emulation with no performance improvements – and while that isn’t much of an issue with the earlier top down games, it proves to be quite a problem with the 3D games which have super shoddy frame rates which can drop into single figures and a resolution so low that everything looks massively pixelated at every distance. Oh and the actual playable viewport is tiny and though you can expand it, it looks super blocky. Look, I’m all for game preservation and keeping games as they were to a point, but when these games were originally released they were hugely compromised by the low powered hardware of the time and rendered practically unplayable as a direct result of those circumstances. This collection represented an opportunity to resolve that and maybe gain these titles a clutch of new fans into the bargain, but alas, just the bare minimum was done and nothing more. What is doubly frustrating is that when you’re playing any of the 3D games, if you accidentally click the right analogue stick you end up restarting the game. To say that isn’t great at all to say the least would be an understatement.
Elsewhere though the co-op modes for the 2D titles are a nice thing to have along with the online rush and horde modes, there isn’t a lot else to see in this collection aside from its archived bonus materials. Bonus materials manifest in the Alien Breed archives where instead of some flat menu as you might see in other retro-tastic compilations, you instead have to navigate around a specially designed, top-down game map and can inspect each artefact from the series history. Though I get what they were going for here, I can’t help but think that a more traditional Digital Eclipse style presentation would be better and more intuitive.
In the end, Alien Breed: 35th Anniversary Collection feels like a litany of missed opportunities all wrapped up into one disappointing package. Not only were many of the games included in this compilation not all that great to begin with to put it mildly, but the absolute lack of any kind of real performance improvements, coupled with some truly annoying user experience flaws, mean that this package remains solely the vintage of those who either remain obsessed with the Alien Breed franchise, or simply want to see if, nostalgia aside, the games were as subpar as they remember them.
Alien Breed: 35th Anniversary Collection is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.