I just completed Aliens: Armageddon at my local arcade, they finally got the machine at long last. I got the top score of 79,710 and it's damn pleasing to see my name at the very top.
I'll post my review of the game in a bit for any who's there interested in it.
As promised, here is my review of the arcade game:
Aliens: Armageddon is the latest rail shooter from Play Mechanix, it follows the heels of its predecessor Aliens: Extermination and boasts that it "[captures] all of the thrills and excitement of the mega-hit movie and then some," but does this new arcade really have what it takes to follow up on James Cameron's award-winning movie?
Armageddon is brand new game similar to Extermination which was a previous game many fans adored but sadly I did not. When I played Extermination, I initially enjoyed playing it until the game's progress-ruining glitches came up. The first time I tried to beat the game, I failed at the 3rd (out of 4) boss because the token I put in the machine rolled back out of the slot and the 10 seconds to insert token expired. The second time I tried it, the game crashed on the final boss when apparently I shot the enemy off the track and it never reappeared on the screen thus requiring tech support to reboot the game. I arrived at Armageddon hoping these issues would be fixed and to an extent they have. Whenever one dies in the game, they now have a 30 second window to insert new coins (or in my case, swipe a card) to restart the game. Furthermore, there were no noticeable boss glitches to ruin my progress so I was pleased on that front as well.
The plot premise of Armageddon is very simple, the research vessel Capella has been overrun with Aliens, one of the crew activates a self-destruct sequence blowing the ship into pieces which, alongside escape pods occupied by humans, fall toward Earth. The Aliens, being the ultimate bio-weapon, naturally find a way to survive the self-destruction of the ship and make it intact on Earth along with the survivors. It is on Earth where the start of the game takes place and from there, the player must battle hordes of Aliens in order to survive. The Earth is considered lost to the Alien plague and the last of humanity, which for some reason consists only of the crew of your destroyed ship, attempts to make it toward "the Ark" (a cargo ship) to escape Earth.
It's a very simple story but sadly it is too simple, with no depth whatsoever. There isn't much excitement, or anything new to add, after Play Mechanix's predecessor, Aliens: Extermination. The plot is very clichéd and feels pasted together with barely an afterthought. I know that since this is an arcade game, nobody is expecting amazing story details but even Aliens: Extermination had more twists and turns than this sequel. The game features 4 chapters but each chapter feels more or less like the same experience as the one before thus removing any distinction any part of the story may have held.
As the game progresses, you switch between a variety of weapons including Assault Rifle (no Pulse Rifle?), Smartgun, Shotgun, Flamethrower, Sniper Rifle, and two different kinds of turrets on APCs. The
gunplay itself is pretty poor, the gun you start out with is a single-fire type with a ridiculously slow rate of fire; I found the gun so difficult to use that I had to stop using my index finger to fire and instead rely on my middle and ring fingers, even in Extermination when you ran out of ammo and had to resort to the pistol, that weapon had a much better fire rate than the weapons in Armageddon. The Smartgun, which is supposed to be an automatic weapon (with tracking capability, mind you) also had to be fired as a semi-auto; I don't know if the game was glitching when I played it as I thought I saw other players not have this problem. Normally, I might be able to overlook this if this were the case but considering the glitches present in Extermination which cost me $40 for 2 separate playthroughs of which both caused the game to crash before I could complete, I'm not in the mood to give Play Mechanix any more leniency on the issue.
Another issue I noticed is that there's no tutorial for the game once someone puts their money in, therefore some newbie players I've watched had no idea how to reload or that there was even a grenade button to take advantage of. Having played Aliens: Extermination before and considering the fact that Play Mechanix bases all its arcade games around the same gun model, I already had an idea how to play but many of the more casual players were at a loss of what to do and therefore lost precious health figuring out the mechanics such as how to reload.
Armageddon tries to compensate its lack of story (or originality) by introducing new enemy types; the obvious choice being brand new breeds of Aliens. There's the standard Xeno we've seen in the movies, there's a new arachnid-type Alien that spits acid (probably born from an offworld species on the Capella), and the Dragon Alien from Extermination makes a comeback (though as a standard enemy this time instead of a boss, which is good because there's no reason why a standard Xeno drone that flies should be made boss); there are also flying facehuggers and giant chestbursters that one must contend with as well. While there certainly are a new variety of enemies, they aren't particularly original and most are rehashes of things we've already seen in other titles or were simply created with little thought behind them. Extermination did a better job, even adding armed synthetics from the evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation as enemies to create more diversity in its story than Armageddon.
Furthermore there are also only 2 different boss characters for the 4 boss encounters (one for each chapter) in the game thus reinforcing the idea that the developers didn't put much effort into developing it. The same boss in Chapter 1 makes a reappearance in Chapter 2 and the same boss in Chapter 3 makes a reappearance in Chapter 4. Those who have seen the gameplay demos on the machine before playing can easily see that the boss characters are
Spoiler
A giant bipedal Crusher Alien and a Flying Alien Queen.
Extermination had a different boss for each of its 4 unique chapters, the fact that Armageddon fails to live up to its predecessor re-emphasizes the lack of chapter distinction and makes the design seem sloppy and lazily hashed out.
Unlike Extermination, however, this game
does introduce actual characters that the player will get to know and recognize as the game progresses; one is a foot soldier like yourself and the other appears to be some kind of general. While Extermination only had Marines that were pretty much nameless cannon fodder for the Aliens, Armageddon actually allows you to connect (as best you can in a shallowly written plot
) with these 2 characters. Armageddon recognizes the importance of these characters by adding subtitles to the game, an important yet often overlooked aspect that Extermination lacked considering how loud it normally is at arcade centers. Armageddon also lacks friendly fire allowing players to fire indiscriminately without having to worry about accidentally shooting allies, whereas Extermination penalized players for it; whether this is an improvement or not largely depends on the player's preferences in gaming.
The look of Armageddon is also unlike previous games, both on arcade and on home gaming platforms. The design is very similar, if not exactly the same, to Borderlands (the franchise that allegedly used Aliens: Colonial Marine's money and left that title as a destitute, and now-hated, game). The graphics have a somewhat surreal look to them kind of like a computer-generated cartoon, personally I'm not a fan of this look but that's down to personal preference as other players may enjoy the feel. My biggest gripe regarding the design is that they have turned the Aliens' color scheme from black to brown. I don't know why all the new Alien games are going brown (Alien: Isolation and Aliens: Armageddon); to me, the black color from Aliens is the fan favorite, not the brown color from Alien: Resurrection.
It seems pretty clear that Play Mechanix tried very hard to differentiate Armageddon from Extermination as much as possible in an attempt to avoid a duplicate product, much like how game designers do with their games and DLC releases. Sadly, this means messing with a classic formula and often turning it into something else entirely, I would have greatly preferred a "corrected" version of Aliens: Extermination that lacked its previous glitches. Armageddon is a mediocre game at best, but its saving grace is that it corrects the mistakes of its predecessor. Armageddon isn't the Aliens game fans have been clamoring for, but it works hard to be the best game it can be.
Stars: 2/5
