Alien Hominid
Prepare to die. A lot. And love it. A lot.
Published: December 16, 2004
I've rewritten this review a good two or three times now, and I still don't feel like I do the game's merits justice. Alien Hominid is one of those cool games that you can feel like an elitist for recommending (because it's so effing old-school die-four-times-in-a-row), but that still has the cutesy kind of appeal that will hopefully entice a couple of normally stand-offish gamers.
It's also hard. Real hard. Really effing hard. It's also also quite tasty and some kind of throwback relief for my soul that I didn't think I'd see after the Contra remakes came and went. In fact, I'd say this is probably the best kind of Ouija-esque channeling of the old NES Contra luv that we've been missing for so long that I've yet seen in this or any generation since Konami first poured that sugar on the collective nerd masses back in the mid-80's. It's that rad.
The basis of the appeal is simple: this is a challenging game that looks cool, plays like an old-school shooter's dream, and reminds you of exactly why you needed to plunk in the Konami code to get anywhere when you first played Contra in the first place (incidentally, the game gives more or less the equivalent of that from the get-go, but don't worry; you'll die plenty often).
When a cute-yet-ultraviolent alien is shot down by the FBI, he makes it a personal quest to retrieve his ship and get the hell off this rock -- bystanders and especially meddling agents be damned. He'll hack them in half, burn them, freeze and shatter them, melt them, and plenty more on the way, but then they never should have gotten in the way (or shot at him). He's also lovably adorable, and this mix of "awwwwwwwwwww" cuteness and extreme animated violence that makes the game such a treat to watch.
You'll progress through five levels all over the world, subdivided into sections like 1-1, 1-2 (remember when games actually named stages like that?), ultimately trying to get off this rock and back home. Along the way, the game more or less adheres to strict classic shooter guidelines; patterned boss fights, endless streams of enemies and a level of difficulty that will kick your ass, but it's nothing that with practice (and good ol' fashioned memorization) that you can't lick, and that's why the game is so good; you'll die plenty of times figuring things out, and there's never really a lack of challenging sections, but it's all accessible given enough time (and lives).
It's not like the game's unfairly difficult either; pass a level and it's unlocked from the main menu to start from, meaning you can train those couple dozen or so lives on a new level once you finally take that long, adorable-yet-sad walk down Game Over road. Of course, purists will probably try to race from the beginning to end, and I'm more than confident that it's possible (perhaps I'll even try it over the Christmas break), but the key here is that you can blow plenty of guys just getting past a level.
As good as the gameplay is, however, the real star here is the artwork. AH is, in no uncertain terms, one of the most instantly gorgeous and awe-inspiring examples of what hand-drawn artwork can provide for a game in this era of polygons and bump-mapped, vertex-shaded, multiply-lit surfaces. There's a purity here that just isn't seen in games and until this one came along, I honestly thought it was the death of the medium.
But the hand-drawn artwork is alive and well here, and oozes with personality, from the adorable grin the Alien takes while mowing down baddies in his commandeered tank (or bulldozer, or Yeti, or what have you) to the jaw-droppingly awesome hand-drawn explosions that seem to pop up about every three seconds. This game is quite simply gorgeous, and has an incredible cohesive feel to the art design. Everything, including menus, weapon fire, explosions, backgrounds and ways the Alien can die are lovingly, painstakingly drawn out with the kind of attention that Disney artists labor over with their movies. Everything is heavily-edged and shaded with your basic cartoony light-normal-dark shades, but I can't possibly do the appeal of seeing it all in fluid motion justice. This is a controllable sketch brought into being with the most tender of care, and it shows.
Things aren't perfect, of course; the hand-drawn art means some details -- like, oh, say the shots from common enemies -- can be quite difficult to pick out from the background, resulting in more than a few accidental deaths, but by and large, it's all big, bold, deeply parallexed and impressively smooth and detailed, giving the game the feeling of an animated student film, and means it's all the more impressive.
It's not just the imagery, either. The sound is just as impressive, or at least the music is. Most of the effects (particularly the glorified pop-gun effect that comes from most common thugs all over the game world) are a little flat and don't really stand out too much. They feel pretty firmly rooted in the lower-quality "proprietary" phase that the Newgrounds.com flash game that birthed this little gem first offered.
Again, though, the music overcomes most of this, relying heavily on some disco- or techo-style beats strewn across a handful of slightly funky and utterly melodic electro-orchestral or flat-out electronica synth notes. There are flairs of Ratchet & Clank-esque highlights, but it really just feels like a more complex version of the 80's shooter sound with tinges of older 50's B-movie vibes (without the campy, whistling tones that made War of the Monsters so chronologically complete), and it's so completely fitting here that anything else would be a disservice to what the game was doing. It's an absolute melding of the visuals with an aural attitude, and even though the effects are a little subdued, everything has a surprisingly snuggly feel.
I cannot possibly recommend this game enough. The freshman effort of the developers at The Behemoth is on par with the ICOs and the Sly Coopers of the PS2. It really is that well done. I shudder to think what this level of talent is capable should they try this whole milieu again, but I'm even more excited about what it could mean. You must, for the love of God, support this game and give it the money it deserves. At $30, it's hardly a rip-off, and I applaud O~3 for having the balls to put this out in the era of ultra-polygons and overblown effects. Buy this game. NOW.
It's also hard. Real hard. Really effing hard. It's also also quite tasty and some kind of throwback relief for my soul that I didn't think I'd see after the Contra remakes came and went. In fact, I'd say this is probably the best kind of Ouija-esque channeling of the old NES Contra luv that we've been missing for so long that I've yet seen in this or any generation since Konami first poured that sugar on the collective nerd masses back in the mid-80's. It's that rad.
The basis of the appeal is simple: this is a challenging game that looks cool, plays like an old-school shooter's dream, and reminds you of exactly why you needed to plunk in the Konami code to get anywhere when you first played Contra in the first place (incidentally, the game gives more or less the equivalent of that from the get-go, but don't worry; you'll die plenty often).
When a cute-yet-ultraviolent alien is shot down by the FBI, he makes it a personal quest to retrieve his ship and get the hell off this rock -- bystanders and especially meddling agents be damned. He'll hack them in half, burn them, freeze and shatter them, melt them, and plenty more on the way, but then they never should have gotten in the way (or shot at him). He's also lovably adorable, and this mix of "awwwwwwwwwww" cuteness and extreme animated violence that makes the game such a treat to watch.
You'll progress through five levels all over the world, subdivided into sections like 1-1, 1-2 (remember when games actually named stages like that?), ultimately trying to get off this rock and back home. Along the way, the game more or less adheres to strict classic shooter guidelines; patterned boss fights, endless streams of enemies and a level of difficulty that will kick your ass, but it's nothing that with practice (and good ol' fashioned memorization) that you can't lick, and that's why the game is so good; you'll die plenty of times figuring things out, and there's never really a lack of challenging sections, but it's all accessible given enough time (and lives).
It's not like the game's unfairly difficult either; pass a level and it's unlocked from the main menu to start from, meaning you can train those couple dozen or so lives on a new level once you finally take that long, adorable-yet-sad walk down Game Over road. Of course, purists will probably try to race from the beginning to end, and I'm more than confident that it's possible (perhaps I'll even try it over the Christmas break), but the key here is that you can blow plenty of guys just getting past a level.
As good as the gameplay is, however, the real star here is the artwork. AH is, in no uncertain terms, one of the most instantly gorgeous and awe-inspiring examples of what hand-drawn artwork can provide for a game in this era of polygons and bump-mapped, vertex-shaded, multiply-lit surfaces. There's a purity here that just isn't seen in games and until this one came along, I honestly thought it was the death of the medium.
But the hand-drawn artwork is alive and well here, and oozes with personality, from the adorable grin the Alien takes while mowing down baddies in his commandeered tank (or bulldozer, or Yeti, or what have you) to the jaw-droppingly awesome hand-drawn explosions that seem to pop up about every three seconds. This game is quite simply gorgeous, and has an incredible cohesive feel to the art design. Everything, including menus, weapon fire, explosions, backgrounds and ways the Alien can die are lovingly, painstakingly drawn out with the kind of attention that Disney artists labor over with their movies. Everything is heavily-edged and shaded with your basic cartoony light-normal-dark shades, but I can't possibly do the appeal of seeing it all in fluid motion justice. This is a controllable sketch brought into being with the most tender of care, and it shows.
Things aren't perfect, of course; the hand-drawn art means some details -- like, oh, say the shots from common enemies -- can be quite difficult to pick out from the background, resulting in more than a few accidental deaths, but by and large, it's all big, bold, deeply parallexed and impressively smooth and detailed, giving the game the feeling of an animated student film, and means it's all the more impressive.
It's not just the imagery, either. The sound is just as impressive, or at least the music is. Most of the effects (particularly the glorified pop-gun effect that comes from most common thugs all over the game world) are a little flat and don't really stand out too much. They feel pretty firmly rooted in the lower-quality "proprietary" phase that the Newgrounds.com flash game that birthed this little gem first offered.
Again, though, the music overcomes most of this, relying heavily on some disco- or techo-style beats strewn across a handful of slightly funky and utterly melodic electro-orchestral or flat-out electronica synth notes. There are flairs of Ratchet & Clank-esque highlights, but it really just feels like a more complex version of the 80's shooter sound with tinges of older 50's B-movie vibes (without the campy, whistling tones that made War of the Monsters so chronologically complete), and it's so completely fitting here that anything else would be a disservice to what the game was doing. It's an absolute melding of the visuals with an aural attitude, and even though the effects are a little subdued, everything has a surprisingly snuggly feel.
I cannot possibly recommend this game enough. The freshman effort of the developers at The Behemoth is on par with the ICOs and the Sly Coopers of the PS2. It really is that well done. I shudder to think what this level of talent is capable should they try this whole milieu again, but I'm even more excited about what it could mean. You must, for the love of God, support this game and give it the money it deserves. At $30, it's hardly a rip-off, and I applaud O~3 for having the balls to put this out in the era of ultra-polygons and overblown effects. Buy this game. NOW.
