ALIEN SHOOTER REVIEW
by Psychbomb / January 11, 2025
Alien Shooter is a game where, true to its name, you shoot a lot of aliens. You play as one of two characters, both of whom I’m forced to assume are also named “Alien Shooter”, for that is their shared and sole purpose. They were nobody before, and will be nobody after. They have entered into this world fully-formed as a divine scythe, come to bring the reaping. The game advertises having hundreds of aliens on-screen at the same time, but it often feels more like you’re up against thousands. While the final kill counts for each level will only just scrape against four digits, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a full order of magnitude higher than that. You shoot what I would put at a conservative estimate to be about three trillion aliens from start to finish.
Maximalism is the word of the day, here. This is a game where you start with dual pistols that have 999,999 bullets, and which find themselves immediately outclassed within the five minutes it takes for you to find the shotgun. The third weapon you get access to is a rapid-fire grenade launcher that holds something like five hundred rounds. It’s good for all of a single stage. Alien Shooter progresses at a breakneck clip, constantly depreciating your weapons in favor of newer, bigger, badder killing machines. By the time you reach endgame, you’ve got a prototype laser minigun with functionally infinite ammo, and you spend the entire level holding down the trigger. There is no room to breathe, because the amount of gunpowder you’re burning through has eaten up all of the oxygen.
This is, to my understanding, one of those nostalgic Russian classics that never got much of a foothold in the west. Much like Etherlords and Space Rangers, what was a hit over there rarely manages to make much of a splash further out here. Eastern Europe is a massive market that remains a blind spot for a great majority of American gamers, despite many of their most notable games now being made available on abandonware websites or preserved through storefronts like GOG. Even so, the fans of Alien Shooter are both strong in numbers and vocal enough to break through the noise and into some subset of western perception; if you look at the comments on any YouTube upload concerning the game, there are thousands of people talking about how they used to play it on their dad’s work machine, or with all of their cousins crowded around the family computer.
I love anything that has this pre-rendered look with the isometric camera angles. It always reminds me of Age of Empires II, which itself brings fond memories of the Renaissance of the PC gaming days. Nothing hits that spot quite like this. In keeping with that spirit, jank abounds. The Steam release comes with two developer save files included in the depot which you can’t delete without breaking the game. It’s a bit of a challenge to figure out what’s broken because of the game and what’s broken because you’re trying to run it on a modern system; the gunshot sound effects kept cutting out for me, which seems to be caused by the game being mad that it’s not being run on Windows XP. Yeah. Me too, man.
Alien Shooter exists on the same thread as the popcorn movie. What’s here will not challenge you in any meaningful way, mechanically or narratively. It will not take you dozens of hours along a grand, sweeping campaign to finish it. It is puerile and mindless, and all that it asks of you is for you to sit down for sixty minutes and shoot more aliens than you’ve probably ever shot over the entire course of your life up until this point. That is all it needs to be.
If you don’t find this at least a little fun, you’re out of alignment and need to recalibrate.
