Alien Breed Tower Assault (Amiga) - Introductory Guide - by LemonAmiga.com
86This is an introductory guide to Alien Breed Tower Assault, a run and gun survival game, released by Team 17 in 1994. It's you VS the Aliens in this top-down shooter, which requires collecting ammo, keys, and money in order to progress. I was never any good with this game, let's see if I get anywhere with it.
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Recorded: 2nd March 2024
Narrated: 18th Nov 2024
Uploaded: 25th Nov 2024
This was always a game I wanted to enjoy, but the difficulty meant it was for the die hards only. The original Alien Breed game almost made it to the series a few years ago, when we played it in the competition. But the footage was corrupt so I never got to review it. I really need to be in the right head space for the AB games, of any description, and so I never went back to it. On March 2nd 2024, SQRon posted a strategy guide video with narration on Lemon Amiga.
httpshttps://www.lemonamiga.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2ing memorised as much as I could over the first 30mins, I quickly loaded up the game and set the camera rolling. But is wasn't so easy. I was immediately lost, and could only remember the basics of the guide I'd just watched. So I died and played it again, and ended up being stuck outside. So after starting the game up a third time, as you can see from the footage, I was familiar enough with the first level to afford the weapons and armour, but then got totally lost in the first stores level. So at that point I gave up, and edited the video. It's definitely a game where gradually memorising the levels pays off in the long run, if you have that kind of patience.
Danscore:
The alien breed games were always hit or miss or me. The original games had a fast paced exploration factor, where the whole level exploded after a while, but progress felt like an uphill battle. With this fourth instalment of the unofficial Aliens franchise, things seem even tougher. None of the weapons feel like a huge improvement in power, and the player still has to buy keys if they want to get further. Aliens can appear from the ground you walk on, and some respawn points cant be closed. So the player can take cheap damage, and never gets a sense of relief for having clearing a level of enemies, and getting the whole area secure and locked down. The player cant go backwards in the game to make use of safely cleared areas either. Going outside to explore the grounds should feel rewarding, and allow quick access to any of the 7 towers on offer, to add instant variation and variety. However, the outside areas are lethal, and good luck trying to navigate to the towers. Indoor areas feel familiar to the previous games, with the usual things to collect. The aliens feel like bullet sponges, and having to wait or retreat from every enemy slows down the action, turning this into a 'stand and shoot' game over a run and gun. Puzzles usually involve keys, although the master keys are unlabelled, so good luck knowing which keys are for which special doors. Some doors require keys of specific colours, but these dont seem to appear on your HUD either, and you cant save special keys from previous levels. Saving health is also difficult, because it often means takes damage to go back and collect your saved health. It would have made so much more sense to store health in a kit bag, like Tomb Raider or an RPG, and to use it when necessary.
Two player mode is really the only way to get far unless you have a lot of patience. The Second player mode means two streams of firepower towards the enemies, although sharing the ammo on the levels means players have to ration it or buy more. It would have been great to have a CPU player as a backup, like The Chaos Engine, so that this mode could be used for solo play. Its also a shame that there are no survivors to save, or fellow combat agents to team up with, to deal with surprise onslaught attack waves as a team. This feels a lot more expansive than the previous games, but following a too familiar format. So I give this 7 out of 10. It's a good game, but the key puzzles are boring, the scenery is too samey, and the weapons are too weak to warrant anything more.