Publisher:
Sega
Developer:
Totally Games
Release date:
Jul 23 2007
Reviewed on:
Wii

I never played the Alien Syndrome on the Sega Genesis. That probably had something to do with never having a Sega Genesis or maybe it was because at that time the only top down shooter I would play was Smash TV. If I can say one thing about Alien Syndrome for the Wii… it’s why in the hell don’t they make a new Smash TV?

While rating this game, I wanted to keep a good prospective of what other games are available for the Wii and how Alien Syndrome fits into the overall library of the Wii. Having heard a few horrible things concerning the PSP version of this game, I would like to focus on how developer Totally Games has decided to institute the wii remote into the game play of this third person dungeon crawler.

I find the game play to be a very nice mix of typical dungeon crawler mechanics combined with some pretty wii remote actions. Totally Games has utilized the wii remote to the limit on this title. The nun chuck provides Aileen Harding, the game’s protagonist, with her basic movement functions. She controls deftly using the analog stick, while the C button turns on a sometimes useful shield that drains away at your energy meter giving you protection from only a shot or two before you either must turn it off or being consuming large amounts of energy packs. The Z button becomes almost second nature, as it is mapped to pick up items and activated the myriad of switches, doors, knobs, computer terminals, and bonus games.

Meanwhile you will find the remote itself to conduct actual combat and deal with your menu systems. Alien Syndrome does a fairly good job of encouraging both melee and gunplay by making both fun with their own individual advantages. Sticking far away from battle with your two swappable firearms gives you the ability to pick and choose your battles. However, Totally Games has included a fairly robust melee system that allows you to really dole out the damage. Included within the melee attacks is a particular favorite of mine. Many times when an enemy is defeated, you’ll notice it will become dizzy before it terminates. If you are standing above the foe with your melee weapon drawn, you can thrust both the nun chuck and remote down to finish off the enemy and at the same time, gaining a little bit of health back. This leads to a Diablo-esque dungeon crawl in which going toe to toe is actually possible. You aren’t stuck to slamming down those health packs in an attempt to stay viable within combat. It’s like instituting a vampiric weapon right off the get go.

Other nice touches to the controls are the ability to swing the camera around via rotating the nun chuck. As long as all players (which is supported up to 4 via local only play) acknowledge one player as cameraman and REMEMBER to not just roll the nun chuck around all will be well.I would have liked to see a system in place to disable nun chuck camera control on all but one player’s controller. Misclicks due to the small menus are common. Items swapping between players could have been more streamlined, but overall I enjoy the smoothness of the control setup. You nearly have the speed of a mouse and keyboard going through all the various menus and combat styles.

I find a completely overblown hard to swallow plot more offending than what you would consider a generic plot, so Alien Syndrome falls in a comfortable spot for me. What you have here is your basic Aliens/Metroid plot. A young but experienced officer named Aileen Harding is dispatched to investigate the loss of communication with a remote frontier planet assigned for terraforming. What she encounters there is something the humans of the very very distant future elegantly call “Alien Syndrome”. Yeah, I don’t think it’s a scientific name. This syndrome basically corrupts everything it touches causing men, creatures, and even machines to turn into methodical killing machines. At least that is the impression Aileen gets as she is dealing with her own personal demons via the Captain of this mission, Captain Trevor James.

While the story is present in your standard chunks, basically before and after every mission with maybe a mission order barked out every few minutes, I found some parts of the game to be above average. For instance, a long chunk of the early game is spent on a space station attempting to find survivors. Once found, you would imagine they would be very grateful for your rescue but this is not the case. The civilians are so crazed from the horrors they have been seeing that they turn their weapons on you without hesitation, forcing Aileen to deal with them the only a soldier would know how: with the business end of a shotgun.

It is a very strong opinion of mine that instead of constructing this game as a PSP/Wii hybrid, the presentation of the game would have been much better suited as a Wii only effort. It is evident by the many interviews with the developer Totally Games that the Wii version was where all the creative work went. Basically you will be looking and listening to a PSP game on your TV. It is important for me to point out that the game does not look bad in anyway. It is a crisp with very few glitches or badly designed stages. The game abounds with broken gas mains, geysers of sand, and very expansive starship areas. What gives the game a bad rep is the low poly count. It is obvious the graphical abilities of this game were built with the PSP in mind. The art design is odd at times, as some of the enemies represent a lazy attitude such as puffballs with spikes that blow up when you get too close. The majority of the Alien Syndrome is well constructed and interesting to look at it, which is good because you will be looking at a lot of them. Totally Games pulls some old school bullshit by swapping color palettes for harder enemies but in some ways it feels like a throwback to the red slime in Dragon Warrior being slightly harder than the blue slime.

The music is something completely different. What at first starts off as a nearly elevator music soundtrack soon grows into something much more interesting. As you get near the end of your first real mission of the game which is discovering the remaining civilians of the infested space station the music becomes more epic but still retaining a very powerful feeling of solitude and despair. Both myself and my fellow lan-gaming staffer James have commented on wanted to get the soundtrack to Alien Syndrome on a cd to listen to outside of the game. I also find the plethora of sound effects enjoyable as certain weapons just have such a distinct sound to them such as the Sonic Wave gun.

Alien Syndrome is quite meaty of a game, easily heads above most of the offerings on the Wii. While it may feel repetitive in long play sessions, the combined motion controls along with the ability to jump in and out with an character locally created on the Wii during any mission makes that game very pick up and play friendly. A more streamlined menu system and the ability to either play via wi-fi or at least transfer your character between one Wii and another would have been a godsend. It can be said that Totally Games wished to simply get their game on the market before the Halo 3s and Metroid 3s hit their respective consoles and sucked what little time Alien Syndrome gets from the masses. Focusing on what makes the game fun, run and gun combined with robust melee combat has given Totally Games a well earned if not completely mind blowing game experience. Come on Aileen, I’ve waited for this moment. It means everything!

Grade: A