Alien Rage: Old school in more ways than one.

Over the 10 plus years I’ve been writing about video game stuff, one thing that’s stayed constant is me writing about the most jankiest, clunky games out there, often in January. So much so that I almost considered making an event called “Jank-uary,” where people would play these particularly busted games as a celebration of the underdogs and trash of video game culture. Maybe I’ll still consider that in the future if there’s any interest.

Since it’s the start of a new year, what better thing to write about then yet another janky FPS? After all, might as well keep up my tradition of writing about this jank. This time with a developer I’ve talked about a few times in the past!

("Bet you can't scream louder than me, human!" Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

Alien Rage is a first person space shooter made by the present-day masters of budget label games: CI Games. Released on Steam, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2013, the game came out to mostly uneventful fare, often being forgotten except by people like me who are a glutton for punishment as well as quality Eurojank™.

We’ve talked about CI Games/City Interactive twice before: Once in January 2018 when I wrote about the interesting-but-flawed Enemy Front, a World War II FPS that tried to be a bit more stealth-action like the old school Medal of Honor days; and again in April 2021 where I covered the infamous Terrorist Takedown, a rail shooter that was made during peak War on Terror, and for a long while was CI Games’ most iconic franchise before Sniper: Ghost Warrior came around.

Since I’ve played a myriad of the company’s work at this point, I know to go into this game with the lowest of expectations. And boy those expectations were definitely met. The result is a game that doesn’t quite understand what it wants to be.

(It's always those rare materials, isn't it?)

Taking place in the distant future of 2242 AD, space soldiers find a new material named Prometheum on a space rock, which they use to make a space colony. Then the Vorus, an alien race, come in and invade, taking over the Prometheum, and starting a war between the humans and the aliens. Eventually the aliens burrow underground to further stop the humans in their tracks, and it’s all hinging on the help of one supersoldier named Jack to go in and save the day, though he’s helped by an AI helper named Iris and a supporting character named Ray.

(Well, this certainly looks ominous...)

Alien Rage is a bog-standard FPS. Jack can hold three weapons: a sidearm and two human or Vorus weapons he procures throughout his journey. Standard WSAD controls for movement, left click fires, right click ironsights, F does a melee attack, and E is the catch-all use button, where Jack will activate keypads and climb over chest-high walls when prompted. Middle mouse button activates a special alternate fire which changes for each weapon: A burst fire for the pistol, a grenade launcher for the SMG, etc. The player can hold a maximum of five of these overall, and can be used for any of the game’s weapons at any time, so one must be careful when using them on a pistol rather than a rocket launcher.

(Getting some Call of Duty vibes out of these medals...)

Where the game differs is this: The game scores based on how well Jack kill things. Killing aliens gets points, and killing several at once or with explosives will have badges show up like it’s a multiplayer match of Call of Duty, complete with an Unreal Tournament-like announcer calling those achievements. In a sense, this feels like something taken out of Bulletstorm, or as I later realized, Serious Sam or Painkiller. 

(Kind of a dick move to put the more defensive perks towards the late game, after dying constantly to low-level enemies and bosses.)

This is built into the game's design thusly: The score is accumulative, and hitting certain point thresholds unlocks a perk that helps Jack passively, like increased health, increased damage with certain weapon types, and stun resistance. When the game starts, Jack doesn’t have any of these perks unlocked, and getting some of the more important perks require the player to grind for points. It makes some of the combat sections a bit less insufferable, but grinding for the good perks is a bit frustrating.

(CI Games should've taken a page from Doom 3 and had these unlock locker codes or something. Would've made it worth it to look for them!)

There’s also collectables to find. Jack will find these weird triangle-shaped things that will give him bonus points, audio logs that can flesh out the game’s lore – however little of the lore there is – and that’s about it. There's no secret areas or levels, and nothing interesting like hidden weapons or abilities. After a while I stopped actively hunting these out, as the points I would've gotten for it wasn't worth my time.

(I mean, at least this breaks up the monotony a little...)

On the surface, Alien Rage just feels like another shooter. Shoot enemies, try not to get shot, taking too much damage incurs the Bloody Screen™, that sort of thing. Outside of a few rail sections and a part where Jack pilots a giant mech, the game is shoot shoot shoot from beginning to end. 

The thing is that even on “Challenging,” the game’s middle difficulty, the game does not mess around. Several times I died by the hands of overwhelming numbers just melting through my health while I dumped a lot of ammo into them, either taking forever to die or me getting lucky headshots instantly. And most of these enemies spawn from fancy teleporters on the floor, making it easy to predict when you're about to hit a combat section.

(I learned very quickly to hate these bastards with a passion.)

Rarely have I played a shooter where the enemies were incredibly aggressive as Alien Rage. The low level grunts and elites were eager to chase after me, even if I fell back to get ammo and such. The grunts have a stun ability, making me unable to attack and thus take a lot of damage and die. This is one of the rare shooters where it was a bad idea to push past it, instead I often hid behind cover and just blasted enemies as they chase after me. 

(This guy was king bastard. And he was the first boss fight!)

Then there’s the boss fights. Hoo boy, these were an absolute pain. While most of them fit the archetype of a classic FPS boss with a giant arena with a big bad and lots of supplies to take them down, they too were fairly punishing, leading me to constantly dying as I tried to figure out the trick of the boss, which often involved circle-strafing while either dumping ammo into them or finding their glowing weak points to destroy them quickly. They at least break up the action, but a shame none of them are enjoyable or memorable.

(This doesn't look too bad... for a budget game in 2013, at least.)

I haven’t even gotten into the game’s look and sound. For a 2013-era game, the art style is passable but genuinely forgettable. So much blue, black and yellow. Lots of flashy transparency and particle effects. However, a lot of the locales blended together despite them trying to be different locations. The music is rather innocuous military-sounding music, yet the voice acting is surprisingly passable.

(Jack is like if Marcus Fenix and B.J. Blazkowicz fused together. He certainly looks different than in the box art.)

Our hero Jack isn’t properly credited, but judging by the tone and inflection, I’m hazarding a guess it’s Brian Bloom. I say this because Jack sounds like a literal dead ringer for B.J. Blazkowicz in the later MachineGames-developed Wolfenstein games. Now I can’t say if that’s true or not – places like Mobygames, IMDB, and Behind the Voice Actors don’t credit Bloom as the voice of Jack anywhere – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him. I wonder if someone at MachineGames played Alien Rage, heard Jack and went “That’s our B.J.!”

Jack gets a few decent wisecracks, as opposed to Iris the AI supporter, who loved referencing other video games as a wink and a nod to being an AI, and Ray being just an unsufferable doofus. 

(At least it doesn't look like generic brown shooter like Gears of War, I guess?)

As for the rest of the game, there isn’t much else to talk about. Throughout Jack is trying to stop the Vorus threat from stealing all the Prometheum, and his only solution is blasting through everything. At times I felt like I was playing some classic eurojank like Alpha Prime, complete with the “people trying to steal important space material that helps the human race and Our Hero has to stop it” premise. 

Even though I stopped the Vorus threat and beat a space spider and escaped, the victory felt kinda hollow. They sorta set up the end cutscene for a possible Alien Rage 2 but sadly that's not happened yet, and since it's been nearly a decade I think the "God of Alien Rage," Michal Sokolski, will have to be disappointed that his creation ends after the first game.

Naturally like all video games these days, Alien Rage has a multiplayer mode, but it was exclusive to the PC version of the game – console versions just had the campaign mode. I tried to see if anyone was playing it, and found out it was a ghost town. Then again, I’m probably not missing much. And judging by how the more recent releases of Alien Rage bundled the game’s multiplayer DLC for free, under the banner of Alien Rage – Unlimited, I’m probably not the only one who didn’t care.

(At least they could maybe telegraph these combat sections with a bit more subtlety?)

And that’s Alien Rage. Another unremarkable action game that’s confused on what it wants to be: A generic space shooter, a score-attack shooter like Bulletstorm, or as the game’s description says, an old-school styled shooter game. It’s an alright shooter, a mediocre and unremarkable score attack game, and this definitely doesn’t hearken back to the days of Doomand Quake. If anything, it feels like the “old school” shooter it’s styling itself off of are the Serious Sam and Painkiller franchises: Outright actionfests with a score element. But I’d honestly rather play those games, even the more unremarkable ones like Serious Sam 2 or the dozen or so Painkiller expansions that aren't very good.

Though, Alien Rage also feels like it’s trying to hearken back to the days of mid-2000s sci-fi FPSes. You know the ones, the ones that tried to capitalize on Halo’s success with varying levels of results. Stuff like Area 51, Pariah, and Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. Games that weren’t terrible, but hardly memorable. And that’s genuinely how I felt playing Alien Rage. It’s just… meh.

CI Games found their niche early on and pretty much stayed there. That’s a bit commendable, but it also makes their games just blend in the background while other more interesting shooter games take the fold. But hey, if it works for them and they gain a small following, I can't really complain too much. It just puts them in the same category as other companies like Rebellion Developments, where they're known for a handful of franchises.

Alien Rage often goes on sale on Steam for about a couple of bucks, and with how cheap it can get, you could do much worse with your time and money than this. Though, I don’t think it’s really worth playing unless you’re like me and have a penchant for playing budget jank, but even then there’s more enjoyable jank than this. Don’t go in expecting greatness is what I'm saying.

(This screenshot defines how I feel about this game, really.)

It’s interesting how I’ve now written about the three genres CI Games have tackled in the many years they’ve been around: modern military shooters, World War II shooters, sniping games and space FPSes. I can’t think of any other shooter genre they haven’t tackled at this point. Perhaps one day I might need to play their attempt at making a Dark Souls-like game in Lords of the Fallen. Certainly ain’t playing any of their Sniper: Ghost Warrior games again any time soon, that’s for sure.