Alien Breed Evolution: Episode One

Presumably a stylistic choice, this means the camera sometimes gets a bit too close for its own good, with enemies liable to launch attacks off-screen. The issue is especially relevant in co-op, where the limited freedom of movement often forces you to stay in very close proximity to avoid getting trapped against scenery while your partner wanders off.

One of the more curious decisions is to separate single-player and from that co-op mode. At first this feels like a great idea, but the single-player game would also have benefitted from an optional co-op partner - even if meant breaking the narrative arc. Breed veterans would probably agree that the game was always best played with a buddy, so to force players into riding solo for the bulk of it runs counter to what many players - myself included - would have preferred.

This perhaps wouldn't have been such an issue were the co-op mode itself not such a throwaway exercise. There's rarely enough loot to go around, as it's shared between you, and the gameplay balance is thrown out of whack the moment you realise that death means respawning a few seconds later complete with the default weapons loadout and ammo. It's often beneficial to die so you can resume better equipped than before. With no real need to tread carefully, co-op play quickly descends into a monotonous trudge.

Unfortunately, some of the same issues apply to the single-player campaign as well, with a singular lack of variety apparent throughout. The game punctuates the combat with a series of fetch quests, and removes the explorational element by getting you to follow waypoints on the mini-map. But as faithful to the originals as this probably sounds (apart from the waypoints), it doesn't scale particularly well over the course or four or five hours.

Played over any kind of extended period, the repetition starts to numb, and minor failures via careless save-game management make you angry. On that basis, Alien Breed Evolution is one of the few Xbox Live Arcade games best savoured one chapter at a time over a week or two, rather than consumed with fervour all at once, and indeed when I started playing it that way I had a lot more fun.

Alien Breed Evolution really could have benefitted from a more progressive design, too. Having nailed the controls and delivered a lavish audio-visual makeover, it then proceeds to give you little more to do than chase waypoints, activate panels and shoot half a dozen types of aliens with the usual array of sci-fi weaponry. Apart from a memorable chase sequence in the early stages, the game waits right until the very end before unleashing another surprise. In between, you're essentially just killing a truckload of aliens and rebooting machines.

Had the game perhaps taken a leaf out of Dead Space's book and made the weapons and upgrades integral to the combat, then the issue of repetition would be less of a problem. As it is, there's no real sense that the gameplay moves on from the basic blasting and keycard-hunting that you see in the first 20 minutes, and that initial relief that Team 17 hasn't meddled with the formula eventually gives way to the realisation that, in 2009, this back-to-basics approach isn't enough to carry you for the length of time it demands.