Be it Destiny, The Division or Diablo, there's something about sharing and surviving a gaming experience that makes it twice as rewarding. Alienation, the latest PS4-exclusive four-player shooter, is another that's fine to play with strangers, but you can't wait to try with friends.
We've come to associate Alienation developer Housemarque with beautiful, streamlined, hugely addictive retro arcade games. Think of Super Stardust, Dead Nation or PS4 launch title Resogun and you have titles that take the arcade hits of yesteryear, strip them down to their fundamentals and rebuild them in a gleaming, fiendishly effective modern style.
With Alienation, however, it's up to something different. Like Dead Nation it's a grue-spattered, furiously-paced twin-stick shooter, but now there's something else going on beneath the surface.
What to Read Next
There are clues when you start playing in the choice of three character classes - the Bio-Specialist, Tank and Saboteur - each one with a unique primary weapon and a range of class-specific capabilities, designed to heal and support, deal damage or disrupt.
You can also glimpse it in the emphasis on four-player online co-op, though you can enjoy Alienation as a single-player game. Yet once your helicopter lands and drops your soldier in alien territory, you'll be too busy blasting to think about much else. Alienation throws enemies at you at an unrelenting pace.
A TWIN-STICK ARCADE SHOOTER WITH A TWIST
The core mechanics are classic twin-stick shooter. You race around the scrolling battlefield, pushing on towards the marked objectives. One stick moves, the other stick aims, and you backstep, strafe and generally dance your way through the hordes and their bullets, only taking your finger off the trigger to reload. You can use a range of grenades or mines to whittle down the enemy numbers or mop up the enemies you missed with a well-timed melee slash.
Your character-specific abilities, meanwhile, give you the chance to deal massive damage with ground-pounds and energy blasts, sneak and mislead or heal and buff, depending on your class choice. While Alienation is always a test of speed and reflexes, it also knows how to challenge your timing, tactics and nerve. If you provide the grace, Housemarque will lay on the pressure.
It's hugely thrilling stuff, enhanced by spectacular visuals that turn plasma blasts, beams, explosions and shattered masonry into one continuous alien warfare fireworks display. As you make your way to each objective, facing waves of rushing enemies or foes with heavy arms, you're constantly being pushed by new types, including snipers, slow-moving brutes with homing missiles, and razor-clawed, teleporting killers.
Strategies you develop for one type will fail miserably for another, while combinations will have you working both sticks hard. If it were just an addictive arcade game, pitting you against wave after wave of enemies, Alienation would be one of the very best on PS4.
RPG ELEMENTS MAKE IT A DESTINY FOR DROPOUTS
But Housemarque has other ambitions. This time it's not after a short-term fling, but a full-blown, long-term love affair. For a start, it's adopted an RPG-style character progress system, where experience points earned through blasting level you up, giving you the chance to assign new points to your various abilities.
Beyond that, you're constantly acquiring new weaponry, giving you firstly more powerful primary weapons, then a selection of secondary weapons, including flamethrowers, rocket launchers, plasma shotguns, mini-guns and railguns. Destiny aficionados might note the primary/secondary/heavy split, not to mention the way arms are ranked in terms of level and rarity. What's more, you can even upgrade them, either by applying looted components or by (at a risk) spending components to re-roll their stats.
It's hard to say whether Alienation is a top-down Destiny or a sci-fi Diablo, but the important thing is that it works. It's an action RPG with the focus on the action, but while it plays like an arcade title, the lure of shooting, looting and upgrading works the same.
Played solo it can be an uphill struggle. Levels have procedurally-generated content, and while you can checkpoint your position at occasional beacons (though not in every level), enemies reappear in new combos and positions every time you spawn. This isn't a problem all the time, but when the going gets tough at the end of a level and you have to battle through endless baddies just to get back to where you died, the difficulty level can feel brutal. It says a lot for the game's addictive qualities that you'll keep coming back for more.
CO-OP IS AT THE HEART OF THIS VALUE-PACKED ADVENTURE
In co-op it's a different story. Revives and healing capabilities can give you a much-needed second chance, while simply having more bods on the battlefield to watch your back makes the alien onslaught slightly easier to bear. Like Diablo, The Division or Destiny, there's something about sharing and surviving the experience that makes it twice as rewarding. Alienation is a fine game to play with strangers. We can't wait to try it with friends.
This seems to be the heart of Housemarque's long-term plan. Between a high level cap, procedurally-generated combat, random bounty and horde attack encounters - even optional player invasions and rogue operatives within your game - they've quietly built Alienation as an arcade-shooter with long-term, multiplayer appeal. We're still getting to grips with this stuff but the potential is obvious; this is the arcade shooter that keeps you and your mates blasting long after the campaign, as such, is over. It might not have Destiny or The Division in its sights, but Alienation wants to keep its players coming back for weeks, not days. In terms of value, it's off the charts.
ALIENATION VERDICT
You'll fall for Alienation's great twitch gameplay, but it's with its RPG-like elements that the hooks really sink in. Alienation has created something that's part twin-stick blaster, part sci-fi dungeon crawler, with all the looting, levelling and upgrading that implies. Limited locations and the repetitive shoot 'em up gameplay might make it a less enticing prospect a few weeks in, but right now it's impossible to resist.
Release date: April 26, 2016
Available on: PS4
Developer: Housemarque
Publisher: SCEE
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