Alien Hominid
Our Rating
7.9
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Your Rating
N/A
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Sleeper hits often come from the least likely of places, and Alien Hominid is a perfect example of this. With roots as a flash-based shooter, it's been given a fresh coat of console polish. While its pedigree initially evokes questionable feelings, Alien Hominid's meager background doesn't stop the game from shaking things up a bit. As far as action games go, this is one of the most entertaining displays of hilarious carnage in recent memory.
Alien Hominid follows the plight of an adorable yellow extra terrestrial named--you guessed it--Alien Hominid. Poor Hominid's spaceship takes one in the nose and crashes in the middle of a city on Earth, where he's hunted by swarms of FBI agents, and his only allies are the mysterious "Fat Kids". There's no real dialog to speak of, and the story doesn't get much deeper than that, but that's not to say it doesn't keep you chuckling the whole way through.
Story takes a backseat, in this case, to balls-to-the-walls action. Much like Contra or Metal Slug, Alien Hominid has players blasting through endless waves of adversaries, all while dodging through a hail of bullets. Also like Contra, a single hit from just about anything will bring down poor Hominid, resulting in a lot of annoyingly cheap deaths. Those who are easily frustrated and would like to avoid premature baldness might want to steer clear, as getting to the end of Alien Hominid in one piece takes equal parts skill, luck, and patience.
One of the many things that makes Alien Hominid worth all the trouble are the various methods you're given to dispose of Hominid's would-be disposers. Hominid may be a cute little cartoon space creature, but he's got a startling number of devious tricks up his sleeve. In addition to grenades and his handy blaster pistol--complete with several modes of fire, via powerups--Hominid can slice open foes with his buck knife; he's also able to burrow underground, where he waits for an unsuspecting agent to drag to an early grave; he can even leap onto an enemy's shoulders, only to bite their head clean off. Alien Hominid is in the business of ultra-violence, and business is good.
Another aspect of Alien Hominid that's deserving of praise is the sheer breadth of the gameplay. One minute you'll be leaping from car to car on a busy freeway, avoiding the massive, vehicle-destroying stinger of a giant bee-copter, and the next minute you're sending FBI scumbags plummeting into a wood chipper using your ship's gravity beam. There's even a Simon-like puzzle, where you have to shoot colored, musical lights in order, or face a grim execution via electrocution. That's not even mentioning all the minigames that become available outside of the story mode, each of which are both imaginative and addictive in their own right.
The blood-gushing gameplay is sharply contrasted by Alien Hominid's unique visual style. The overall look is reminiscent of Viewtiful Joe, but with a dash of total absurdity. The 2D backgrounds may lack detail and often become repetitive, but there's more than enough creativity beaming from the character and boss designs. Hominid himself is hardly intimidating, with his giant head, bulbous eyes, and stubby arms. Your human adversaries are built like extremely top-heavy football players, and they sport curiously square heads. Bosses are as lethal as they are ridiculous, including the aforementioned bee-copter, as well as a jet-powered Soviet hammer and sickle death-machine that gives new meaning to the term "Red Scare".
Musically, Alien Hominid is superb. There may not be a great library of tunes on the soundtrack, but what's there is certainly toe-tapping material, especially the background music on the brilliantly-simple PDA minigame. The audio experience is rounded out by decent explosions and shrieks from terrified human soldiers.
All of these elements come together to make a blissful exercise in mayhem, although it's not without its downsides. The boss battles, while memorable, often take way too long to finish. Not only that, but it's also a little difficult to read the bosses' life meters because of the developer's strange choice of implementing a red-on-red health gauge. The cheap deaths often leave you feeling like your fate is totally out of your control, since a lot of areas demand god-like precision and timing. Luckily, players are given the option to continue from their last completed level upon getting a game over.
Alien Hominid is an old-school shooter with a decidedly new-school sense of style. If you've got a craving for something fresh, this is about as fresh as it gets. If you're prone to throwing controllers, back away. Fast.
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9.3