Alien Syndrome Retrospective

The guys at WiiDS have whipped up a retrospective feature for Alien Syndrome, during which they focus primarily on SEGA’s 2007 re-release of the sci-fi action RPG.

Just as the original Alien Syndrome stole from Gauntlet, so too does its sequel borrow from Gauntlet’s modern-day descendants. If you’ve played games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance or Champions: Return to Norrath, you’ll be ahead of the pack. If not, what you have here is a top-down action-adventure RPG. You start off picking one of five classes, ranging from the combat specialist Tank, to the pyromaniacal Firebug to the long-range Sharpshooter. At each level you get points to spend on your various stats, and can unlock new weapons and abilities as you do so. Equipment is dropped randomly by enemies, or can be bought from your floating robot buddy. Aileen is followed everywhere by a little droid called a SCARAB. This droid is probably the most useful thing in the whole game. It houses the shop, which obviously lets you buy and sell weapons, armour and so on, but it also has sub-functions. In combat, the SCARAB can heal you, refill your power and shoot enemies, making it the most useful sidekick I’ve seen in a game for a while, if only for the sheer fact that it can’t die and can’t run suicidally into combat at every opportunity (can you tell I’ve been playing a lot of games where that happens recently?).

I’m not much of a Wii or PSP guy, but I’d probably pick this one up on PC or even Xbox Live Arcade if it ever makes it to either platform.