Alien Storm (Arcade, Sega Mega Drive & Sega Master System)

SON OF A…I reviewed Alien Storm a few years ago, back when I was at Blogger. I deleted the blog page and now I’m back at WordPress and…I lost the review, I mean, the review wasn’t the best quality but history is all but gone.

Oh well, I’m at a point where I feel like re-reviewing games with a fresh mind-set and better quality and so, this game will get the treatment too…then again, there’s no original review so I have nothing for you to compare to but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. The difference here is that I will review the Arcade original, the Sega Mega Drive port and a bit of the Master System port.

I’ve played my fair share of beat ‘em ups, from Final Fight, to Streets of Rage, I’ve played the classics, a few dull, but it’s a genre I really enjoy when done right. When it comes to Sega, if you talk to someone about their beat ‘em ups, chances are they’re going to talk about Golden Axe and Streets of Rage.

But one that gets left out for some is a sci-fi title called Alien Storm (エイリアンストーム), developed by Sega Amusement Machine 1 and published by Sega and was released in 1990. For now, I’ll take a look at the arcade version.

A bunch of evil aliens invade Earth, it’s up to the Alien Busters to defeat the aliens. Just three people…well two people and one robot will be our saviour of the Earth.

You can play as either Garth, Karen, and Scooter the Robot. Once you pick your character, you will go and blast aliens to death (as you should), but the way you play is quite unique in that you will shoot down aliens and you keep on blasting them until they die, but you’ll just get a group of aliens around sometimes to steal your pennies. In terms of gameplay…it’s OK.

I don’t know if I’ve played a bit too much beat ‘em ups, but the gameplay is somehow average, though Streets of Rage II is still much fulfilling. I guess the Humans vs. Aliens concept is a bit overdone, I mean its fine to make a game out of, the gaming industry’s early beginnings consist of alien-blasting goodness, but you simply blast aliens and you get a special attack to destroy all aliens off-screen.

What else can I talk about? OOH, there is another part of the game. So near the end of levels, you go indoors and play a rail-shooter section where you blast aliens and wreck the entire place, causing more damage than the aliens did. It’s pretty good but with another player, it makes these sections more fun and nearly hassle-free because tons of aliens will tear you apart.

Sometimes, you can go fast like Sonic and take down aliens in the form of the style of a horizontal shooter. I really like this part of the game, but they’re incredibly short, at least it’s something even more different than anything you play in the rest of the game.

The graphics are really good, I’m rather fond of the sprite shrinking and enlarging, it’s something you don’t see on the Sega Mega Drive. The level design is pretty good, it’s a beat ‘em up and it does what it does best, but it’s not really interesting. The music is OK, but I love the end theme, the Nuclear Dance, it’s just funky and bizarre but it’s a nice piece to end the game.

Since the Sega Mega Drive was advertised to be the arcade experience right at your home (to which I call BS after the Super Thunder Blade fiasco), Alien Storm was of course ported to that system in 1991 worldwide.

Whilst the gameplay remains near enough the same, the levels are either swapped around or replaced with something completely new, giving you eight levels as supposed to the nine in the Arcade original. It’s also a bit shorter but the difficulty makes up for it. Some music has changed for the levels, especially for the new ones and…it’s still an average game.

You do get two new modes, consisting of The Duel, where you fight enemies in rounds of nine, the further you go, the harder it gets. And 1P vs. 2P, where you battle one-on-one with another player…and that’s about it. Everything I thought about the Arcade original have the same merits here.

And finally, we have the Sega Master System, released only in Europe. The game is a bit clunkier with awful collision detection that hampers the experience.

You only get to play as Garth and Scooter (renamed Slammer in the Sega Master System port, as well as the PAL version of the Mega Drive game), with Karen somehow absent, possibly due to limitations of the hardware (as far as I’m aware).

It’s not as bad as the Altered Beast port, but considering that Alien Storm was an average affair, it’s not any better here.

Overall, Alien Storm has some interesting gameplay elements that tries to be different to other games in the beat ‘em up genre, but it’s just not memorable. It’s the ‘meh’ game in the series of Sega Arcade games, average at best. Heck Alien Syndrome is a much more remembered game than Alien Storm, but it’s not a bad game, there’s just no reason to try it out when you have much better beat ‘em ups elsewhere, but I’d recommend trying it out with a friend nonetheless…or play Alien Syndrome, also made by Sega.

You can get it in the Arcade, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega Master System, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Wii Virtual Console and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 via Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection.