When I first saw the trailer for Alienation, I knew the game would be something special. This dual-stick, isometric multiplayer shooter delivers spectacular, adrenaline-fueled carnage with such finesse that keeps you hungry for more.
At its heart, Alienation is an online multiplayer squad game. Sure, you can play solo, but you’d be missing out on a significant part of what makes the gameplay enjoyable, hectic, and challenging.
The premise of the game is simple: aliens have infested the planet and humanity is in a state of irrecoverable disrepair. A little hope is left, embodied in you and your squad mates. You travel around the globe through the 20 missions, but the narrated story only serves to occupy you during the loading screen and give you objectives on the map, most of which involve going from point to point to activate things or blow up things and mercilessly massacre everything on the way.
The massacre part is the core of the entire experience, and it’s top-notch action that is almost perfect. You choose as one of three classes, each having their own distinct skill tree and ability set, but ultimately aren’t well-adapted to handle all missions on your own. You have your tank with solid offence and defence, a bio-engineer who can heal, and a saboteur who can do some impressive area-damage that sends bloodied aliens up in fire with massive explosions. Each of these classes has their own passive and active skill trees, which you can thankfully repurpose on the fly should you feel you’re not using a particular skill often. These classes complement one another really well, and an evenly distributed squad will leverage all the unique abilities to overcome the insurmountable hordes of enemies you’d face.
The mission maps are massive, giving you enough room to manoeuvre and plenty of space to fill enemies and carnage with. Objectives are marked on the mini-map, but exploring yields great rewards. You and your squad can take your time exploring missions, which can take any where between 20 minutes to an hour. Maps are varied enough to avoid wear and tear, and enemy and event placements on the maps are completely randomised. While objectives are more or less defined, the best parts are everything in between.
You can attempt missions at three different difficult settings, which you can set at the start of every mission. Each setting has benefits; lower difficulties are manageable, but rare and legendary weapons are found at the higher level. Higher difficulties also include more randomised events, such as an onslaught of a “horde” of zombie-like aliens and special killing assignments of challenging enemies. Once you beat the game, the world resets and the ante is upped big time, with significantly more challenging enemies and better loot to, well, loot.
Speaking of looting, there’s a lot of it, although unfortunately everything falls into three types: primary weapons, which are SMGs; secondary weapons, which are generally shotguns and revolvers, and heavy weapons like a launcher, mini gun, and a flashy, chaotic flame thrower. These weapons come in different levels and stats, which you re-roll and socket. Most of the guns can be socketed, and it’s a lot of fun to experiment. Unfortunately, they all look and function the same, so you don’t get envied for having a legendary machine gun; it doesn’t glow or have bullets of glitter. It simply kills faster.
Among the rarest of collectibles are keys to one-off missions, which you need to approach with a squad and with extreme caution. They’re almost illogically difficult, and just as fun as it sounds.
Ultimately, Alienation is a fantastic, easy to pick up arcade game that will have most people immediately hooked. The game is structured in a way that makes every mission a different experience, with plenty of random events, loot, and squad mates to bring along to the party.
