Alpha Prime, developed by European
studio Black Element Software with their own
engine, is another of the lower ranked 2007
action titles with a 59% aggregate. However
in some ways that's quite a generous score.
I'll start with what's good
about Alpha Prime; the looks. Both the engine
and level design look good, well up to 2007
standards. It's your typical corridor shooter
with very few outdoor areas, but there's plenty
of details and nicely built indoor areas, akin
to Doom 3 and Quake 4.
The story received some criticism,
but I thought it actually wasn't that bad. How
it was told was the problem, as there's no cinematics
so everything is told over radio. Which brings
me to the first major issue; the sound. On Vista
and Windows 7 the sound does not work correctly.
Apparently a patch is supposed to fix it, and
putting the sound on low quality improves thing,
but it's still very buggy. Most of the talking
throughout the game doesn't work, you simply
don't hear it and instead have to rely on reading
the subtitles. There are likely to be many other
sounds throughout the game which I never heard
because of this glitch. Apparently it has something
to do with the game not supporting Direct X
10.
What ruins Alpha Prime completely
is the gameplay. There's not enough ammo, there's
not enough health. The enemies are all hitscan
so if you jump out in the open you'll go from
100% health to dead in about 3 seconds. Now
this would be okay if you want to play the game
more carefully like you would a war shooter.
However the weapons aren't built for that! The
shotgun is useless at almost any range, the
machine gun has too much recoil and sprays bullets
all over the place. The flamethrower is useless
unless your a few metres away from the enemy.
The sniper rifle is the only effective weapon,
but there's little ammo for it.
Even with an unlimited ammo
cheat, the game is still too hard on normal
and it turns into a save/reload chore.
I played through to the end
as the level design was decent, but the gameplay
is too frustrating to be any fun at all and
not worth the budget price of a few dollars.
