Here’s another of those quick-fire reviews I’ve been promising since wrapping up my Weekly Spotlight features a couple of months back, and this one’s special… Apart from Worms, I don’t think there’s anything I’d associate more with Team17 than Alien Breed – a franchise that spent most of the Amiga’s commercial life evolving alongside both the studio and the games industry itself. I’ve played loads of versions of most of these ever since, from originals to The A500 Mini to Evercade cartridges, although I’ve always pretty much stunk at the lot – no sense of direction and generally being rubbish at games isn’t a great formula for success with any of the Alien Breeds! Anyway, thirty-five years after the original game first appeared in 1991, the Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection from Antstream gives us six (or five and a bit!) games, complete with modern enhancements and conveniences to help out a loser like me, together with a stack of archive material, interviews and historical context surrounding one of the Amiga’s most iconic game series.
What’s here is every game from Alien Breed’s original run, years before Team17 resurrected the series (for better or worse) with the Evolution trilogy in 2009, beginning with the original Alien Breed and its remastered and remixed Special Edition ‘92 release before moving on to Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues and Alien Breed: Tower Assault. They all come from more or less the same place, taking inspiration from the likes of Gauntlet and a certain James Cameron film to create tense top-down sci-fi shooters, where exploring labyrinthine space stations is just as important as blasting aliens. Keys need collecting and using very carefully to make any kind of meaningful progress, while computer terminals need activating, ammunition constantly runs short, and having a vague idea where you’re supposed to be going is most of the battle! Watching the formula develop from game to game is one of the joys of this collection too, with each sequel gradually becoming larger, more detailed and more ambitious, while mostly retaining the same underlying identity.
The original Alien Breed (pictured at the top) is still my own pick of the bunch all the same though, and mainly because of its “authentic” Alien-type atmosphere. Even today, it’s wonderfully claustrophobic and oppressive, as you wander around dimly lit metallic corridors, listening to that eerie ambient hum and waiting for the next alien encounter. The title music remains absolutely fantastic too (becoming an all-time great in that Special Edition), pulled right out of an eighties b-movie sci-fi VHS rental! Alien Breed II expands everything significantly, introducing bigger environments, new characters and a greater sense of scale in general, while Tower Assault (pictured above) pushes exploration even further with multiple routes through many of its sprawling levels. Whether that’s an improvement probably depends on how much Alien Breed you want in one sitting, but as just alluded to, it’s fascinating seeing Team17 refine the formula across three consecutive games when they’re presented back-to-back like this.
From there, we make the wild jump into not-as-early-as-you-think first-person shooter territory with Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds, and while they might take a bit of adjustment to modern eyes, they might also be the most interesting – not to mention surprising – games here from a historical perspective. Released in 1995 and 1996 respectively – well after Doom’s arrival at the end of 1993 – they represent Team17’s attempt to bring that kind of experience to Commodore’s ageing hardware, and while they’re inevitably products of their time, there’s something hugely appealing about experiencing them today, and they actually play pretty well too. The Killing Grounds especially was an amazingly ambitious piece of work for the Amiga, pushing it miles beyond anything I ever thought possible back then – just check out the screenshot below, which doesn’t even do justice to quite how well it moves too!
As you’d expect, none of these games are included here entirely untouched, and the Anniversary Collection does a great job of balancing preservation and accessibility. I was a bit pessimistic before I got my hands on it, but twin-stick controls do eventually make the top-down games feel far more at home on modern systems, and the first-person entries also benefit hugely from improved performance and contemporary control options. Save states are available everywhere, you can choose between different Amiga model versions where they were available, as well as some demo versions. You’ve got a ton of visual customisations too, with a bunch of CRT filters and bezels, and you can switch between traditional 4:3 presentation and widescreen formats. My favourite extra is definitely The Vault, presented as a far less dangerous in-game archive to explore, full of promotional material, artwork, packaging, retrospective content and developer interviews charting the evolution of both Alien Breed and Team17 itself, which kind of went hand-in-hand until those Worms crawled along.
Elsewhere, there are new challenge options, including Horde Mode and Rush Mode, together with both local and online co-op, but these are more like nice to have bonuses than any kind of main attraction as far as I’m concerned, being a solo player since around the time these came out. The real draw for me is always going to be the original games themselves, and the chance to go back to them with all those mod-cons as you learn more about how they were made and where they came from. It is admittedly a lot of Alien Breed, particularly when there’s so much in common between the first four and then the last two, but if you’re a fan then it’s undoubtedly comprehensive and good value, and the way they’re laid out here really works, like a well-curated museum dedicated to one of the Amiga’s most enduring sci-fi series. Still hard as nails though!
Well, after waiting far longer than I planned to do the first one (here), that’s two of these new style reviews in the space of two weeks! Don’t get too used to it though because I’ve got an action-packed week ahead that unfortunately isn’t going to involve much time for playing games, and certainly none for writing about them! Not long to wait until my next feature though, so do check back on Wednesday when we’ll be heading back exactly 40 years for our regular look at the very latest in video gaming with Retro Rewind: October 1986 in Computer & Video Games, straight from the pages of the original magazine! Hopefully see you then!
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