Most people would probably look at the title of this article…rant…I don’t know what to call this, and say what in the blue blazes of fried Digimon is Alien Rage: Unlimited. Well, I don’t blame you.
ARU (Alien Rage: Unlimited – you think I’m going to keep typing out the games title in this, you’ve got another thing coming) is a 2013 first-person shooter developed by CI Games, in it you play as some hardcore marine type of bloke who loves killing aliens whenever the opportunity presents the ability to do so. Your mission is to kill aliens because they be stealing resources and can’t share like adults, I don’t know, it’s something like that, the story takes a backseat throughout the majority of the game. The intro is really the only place where the story is dumped on you, after that you can further your lore cravings with audio logs…yes…audio logs, one of the most laziest ways to pass on information to the player and they don’t even travel with the player like in BioShock or something, once you find one you have to stay where the audio log is and listen to it there and then, because if you move away from it, it’ll stop, why couldn’t they allow me to listen to it while on the move, who knows. I won’t spoil the ending, there isn’t much of one to be honest as I always hate spoiling things, I’ll always try to avoid spoiling the game for people if I can.
Gameplay is as you’d expect, you go from room to room, corridor to corridor shooting aliens…it works, it’s the strongest element of the game but still it does get very boring at times as the game is unnecessarily difficult, the lowest difficultly setting is called ‘challenging’, not ‘easy’…’challenging’…and the variety of aliens is limited, not unlimted as the title would suggest, the levels geometry is very bland too. Look, I’m not trying to just excrete all over this game, but it doesn’t have many positive points to list. There’s a good amount of weapons you can use and you can take the aliens weapons too, the bosses are fairly different…umm…umm…you can unlock perks to power up your character, there’s these really annoying TRIPLE KILL, HEADSHOT, EXPLOSIVE notifications that come up during gameplay when you happen to kill an alien in a certain way like it’s an arcade game or something, it also shouts them out like the dude narrating trailers does. It’s funny at first but after a few hours becomes really annoying. Thank alien Jesus that the game is like 5-6 hours, I couldn’t imagine a 10-hour campaign with those stupid TRIPLE KILL notifications going off every time you decimate three aliens in a row. The game also likes to throw at you some unwelcome variations in gameplay like a turret section (gotta have one of those right?), controlling mech section, etc. which I wouldn’t mind as much if they weren’t terrible to play and just shows the games inner jank.
Visually speaking the game is okay, you get some nice environmental set pieces now and then but most of the game is inside the alien facility, that’s all I have to say there. From looking at the games Wikipedia page most people’s main point of negitivity was the games lack of originality, which of course it was. This developer literally said, “let’s get together to make a bog-standard alien shooter”, they weren’t trying to make the next Halo or whatever, they made the conscious decision to make the blandest alien shooter they could muster. No originality, no heart, no substance. What a disappointment, why did they even bother, I’ve played Euro-Jank that has more innovation than this, I’ve played simple series games with a better story than this, I’ve played shovelware with better gameplay than this.
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