Genre: 2D Side-Scrolling Action
Publisher: O3 Entertainment
Developer: The Behemoth
Release Date: November 21, 2004

Buy 'ALIEN HOMINID': GameCube | PlayStation 2

I've said this before and it's pretty likely that I'll say it again: I can forgive a lot of things of a game, given enough gratuitous absurd cartoon violence.

Friends, let me tell you - Nobody does gratuitous absurd cartoon violence like internet Flash animators.

Alien Hominid is from that noble bastion of freaky Flash animation and twisted games called Newgrounds, where it's been played over a million times by people all over the world. The console version features freshly rewritten coding, new levels, and a host of upgrades to the core gameplay, but what it notably does not feature is any amount of slack in the gameplay whatsoever. Alien Hominid plays like a leftover from a much simpler time. I am, however, getting ahead of myself.

This is the point where usually I stop and talk a little while about the plotline of a game, but that's a little hard to do in this case. The plotline here is exactly what it needs to be: Minimalist. You're a small yellow alien. While flying your little bubble-dome UFO past the Earth, the FBI catches sight of you on their monitors. (What? Of course the FBI monitors outer space. Don't be silly.) One missile later and the alien is grounded. The men in black cart his ship away, and then turn their guns on him. (Maybe it's her. Genders don't come across well when you're a little yellow pudgy thing.)

That's it. Go shoot stuff. It's a grand tradition, it is.

Now, if names like "Contra", "Metal Slug", and "Gunstar Heroes" don't mean anything to you, you're a heathen and shall be shot at dawn. I should explain to you, though, that these are games in which simplicity is a good thing, enemies come thick and furious, and really the question isn't if you're going to take a hit and die, but how long you can hold out before that inevitably happens. You get a nice load of continues for a reason.

If I turn to hyperbole a lot for this review I'd like to beg forgiveness, it's just that Alien Hominid is the kind of game that inspires that sort of writing. It's the kind of game that builds the twitch-reflex muscles and dooms your thumb to have little round imprints on it for hours after playing. Blazing down the streets of the unnamed but very weird city in the first level, shooting MIB-style FBI agents and watching the odd hit detection in action -- it appears to have five locations that register: face, throat, chest, knees, and testicles, and shot people react accordingly -- against a backdrop of buildings advertising things like "Krappy Cone" and "Enlarge Your Body Parts" and the ever-popular "Fish Are Like Plants Pet Shop", it's hard not to crack a grin at the manic pace things are set at.

Then a giant boss monster made of pudding hands your extraterrestrial ass to you on a silver plate. I did mention this is a tough one, right?

Luckily, the Alien isn't alone in his quest to go shoot stuff and get his ship back. He has an ally in the form of the fat kids of the world, who will provide him with copious amounts of weapons from... uh, somewhere. Don't think too hard about that one. The fat kids also provide backup help in a couple of places, from hang-gliding in to scoop you out of a jam to beating on FBI helicopters with wrenches. If I were feeling analytical, I could posit that there's an almost universal theme being explored here, as the Establishment in the form of the black-suited FBI take on the unfamiliar and goofy Alien, who is backed by the childish glee, wonder, and inexplicable resources of the Fat Kids. It's all about how the Man keeps you Down, and then you get some help from your friends and shoot The Man in the privates with a plasma pistol. Universal.

For additional help, you can enlist a second player, and the game becomes about twice as much fun if you do that. (Both players play the little yellow aliens, but you have different hats, you see. Hats are unlockable for great feats of combat and/or blowing stuff up. Also, Alien + Giant Afro = Funny.) Playing two-player is a joyful experience because there's someone to provide cover fire and... well, an extra gunman never goes unappreciated. The extra firepower is even more of a help during the near-epic boss battles Alien Hominid throws at you. Bosses have a tendency to take up large portions of the screen, and usually when you fight them there's a zoom-out effect, much like some of the SNK games used to fit long range action on an arcade screen. The bosses are engagingly over the top as well, from the previously mentioned giant butterscotch pudding monster to a set of giant Russian stacking teddy bears. The bosses are also, I'd like to mention, controller-pitchingly cheaper than free and can easily destroy a weak man's will to carry on. Be warned. Decide from the start of this game that you can take being one-shot killed within seconds of spawning in, often by construction hardware. Decide this very firmly and then smile when it happens, because to do otherwise would bring forth great rage and then your head would explode in a giant fireball. These bosses can do that to a person.

(Not that it takes a lot in some cases. I digress.)

Alien Hominid also features some of the more popular refinements to the 'run to the side and shoot' genre that have cropped up over the years. You can, for example, pick up an enemy and heave him cartwheeling and screaming through a crowd of his coworkers, and that's a fun crowd-clearer. Vehicles are present in a number of forms from tank to bulldozer, and you can do everything expected with those. You've got the ability to dive left and right and roll under bullets. You have grenades, and they change depending on what weapon you're slinging about at the time you use them. Scatter-shot grenades will dent someone's day really badly, while freeze-bomb grenades create surprised-looking ice sculptures out of enemies which you can smash to bits. Of course, one of the real draws of this game is the ability to leap onto a bad guy's shoulders, ride him around like a two-legged taxi, and then nosh down on his head. The sight of this will set his friends screaming, which is when you make with the hot flaming death. You can also duck underground and reach up to yoink enemies down into a shallow grave.

I like the skill set in this game. There's just enough there to build on the game's strengths without overwhelming the player with choices, so you can just reflexively dispatch enemies without having to worry about what you're doing. The animations are also very nicely done. I mean, I've never personally bitten anyone's head off while riding on their shoulders, but in this goofy 'Invader Zim' meets 'Metal Slug' world, it looks perfect. The right mix of cartoony and splatter to make me feel good inside.

There's a couple of things I want to mention about the main game before I get into the rest of the package. The first is that it feels kind of short, but that's an illusion. There are a good number of stages here, over fifteen at least, but they're placed in one or two environments each. You've got a city background, a snowfield background, and the Area 51 background... and no, c'mon, I didn't spoil anything, you knew it was coming. Each of these lasts about five or so levels. It just feels shorter than it really is, looking back on it. I think it's just the hyperkinetic pacing of the thing.

The other thing I wanted to get into is one of the major drawbacks of the game experience, and that's the fact that occasionally substance has to come before style.

Wow. It feels like I'm betraying some fundamental principle of my nature to admit that.

Quite often Alien Hominid wants to be a slick stylish game, and frankly most of the time it succeeds. The problem comes when little tricks like pulling the camera away from your characters to track a boss leaping high into the air, or putting lots of objects in the foreground of a scene, obscures your view of what you're doing. In a game where looking away for a second can mean you get converted to Fun-Size Bits of Alien Jerky, I'm not sure what the developers thought they were doing purposely yanking the camera away from your view to follow an airborne boss that's frankly doing nothing of interest.

Now, quite aside from the main game, there are a handful of mini-games, mostly multiplayer things. The PDA games are a series of one room mini-games, rather like the old "Super Jump Man" PC game. Man, do I feel old for even remembering that. There's also Neutron Ball (a Basketball take), Soccer (exactly what it sounds like), Super Soviet Missile Master (a bizarre little low-resolution thing that's already becoming a cult hit), and the Piñata Boss bonus stage, in which you chase down and blast a boss that floats through the sky, competing with a friend to see who can harvest the most sweet sweet candy as it rains down. These can extend the gameplay time a little. The PDA games are the most engaging, in general.

So that's pretty straightforward. The major problem is that, well...

This is a very buggy game.

I don't want to have to say that. I'd like to be able to point at this game and tell you that it's a wonderland of playing joy. It's just not, though.

Here's a sample of bugs from my notes: Three counts of the game flashing a green screen and locking up solid between levels. (Keep autosave on. Trust me.) Twice the robot mid-level in the first stage decided that he didn't really want to fight me and ran off-screen, never to return. I'm still not sure what triggered that. While playing in two-player mode with the roommate, one of us (I'm not naming names) died off and ran out of continues, which made the end boss fight in that level never actually trigger. You can, occasionally and annoyingly, be shot right through cover in the PDA mini-games.

There's more, but that's enough. These don't always trigger, but it's enough of a pain when they do that it will stop your gaming momentum dead in its tracks. For that reason, I can't give Alien Hominid as high a score as I'd really like to.

You know, some people say the 2D game is in danger of dying, crushed under a storm of polygons. I don't know about that, but I do think we need more games like Alien Hominid. They're a seriously endangered breed. For this reason this is worth your money, if you can handle a game that's actively devoting all of its attention to kicking your butt up and down the freeway. (I didn't even MENTION the Asteroids homage that turns into a space-based free for all involving more missiles than is probably legal anywhere.) The bugs are a major style-cramp, but it's not as bad as it could be.

It's just not as good as it could be either. Kind of a shame really.

Score: 7.2/10