Attack of the Earthlings (PC) Preview

The Alien franchise has been completely plagued by a lack of actually good games for its franchise. While a few titles do certainly exist, most of the ones that are thought of are, sadly, things like the ill-fated Colonial Marines. Why bring this up? Well, because it's hard not to get the feeling like this was made in an office with a Xenomorph walking the hallways and leaning over the programmers to 'congratulate them' with both mouths.

In the future, the corporation known as 'Galactoil' is busy mining for various resources. Arriving on planets, extracting recourses, and then leaving; seems fairly stock and standard on the whole, except that this time they goofed up and landed on a planet containing a very vicious hostile life-form. Guess which one is the playable character? The alien has now snuck aboard the ship and is intent on killing and devouring as many people as possible and, hopefully, driving the earthlings off of her home planet.

Gameplay is fairly straightforward. Players familiar with the X-COM series will feel right at home here with its emphasis on turn-based, grid-based, strategy play. However, it holds a lot of distinct differences such as, for example, the need to be sneaky. The aliens, despite being vicious, are not able to go toe-to-toe with the Galatcoil security so easily. Human beings have nasty things like 'guns' that would normally give them the edge, so it's important to be careful. Ambushing idling humans and consuming their corpses for resources and to erase evidence, hiding in air ducts to both scout and ambush soldiers to avoid raising an alarm. Open fighting is, surprisingly, very undesirable in favour of playing Xenomorph and ambushing people.

The player starts off with a single hive-mother and will first need to grow their numbers and expand should they desire to remove the humans from their sector. To do this they will need biomass and, hey, guess what just so happens to have a bunch of yummy and delicious biomass on them? As such, hunting down a few unwary snacks is ideal before following up with creating more minions and scouting for more food before planning on how to complete the level. Whenever the human guards come along, though, it becomes essential to hide in whatever can be found - usually a locker or air duct - to avoid raising the alarm and consuming any remains as soon as possible, as well.

Those in control are, furthermore, graded based on how well they did each level based on factors like speed. Should a player do very well, they get rewarded with resources that can be used to upgrade their units, while slower completion results in fewer resources. Therefore, even with the element of stealth, there is a desire to move fast and not dillydally too much.