Alien Hominid Crash Lands on Xbox Live Marketplace

What started out as a small, quirky, independent project on the Newgrounds flash website has evolved into a side-scrolling action shooter that has revitalized the genre the way that Ikaruga did five years ago, spanning several consoles, winning a legion of gamers with its cool visual style and old-school tough-as-nails gameplay.

Fast-paced multiplayer action in Alien Hominid.

Alien Hominid showed once again that you don't need a million-dollar budget and a fifty-man dev team to create an awesome game, and now that Alien Hominid HD has landed on Xbox Live® Marketplace, you can experience it for yourself.

Alien Hominid started as the product of programmer Tom Fulp, who owned the website that AH: HD first appeared on. Tom Fulp programmed the flash version of the game, which featured characters, level art, and designs one hundred percent hand-drawn by artist Dan Paladin. 

The result was a side scrolling shooter that had a distinctive flavor: Think Lilo And Stitch drawn by Matt Groening after a fight with his girlfriend and too many pots of coffee. There are layers of subtle humor laced throughout the level art, and the characters and enemies within the game have a laugh-out-loud style of their own. 

The game itself is simple: You are an alien, shot down by the FBI for getting too close to the earth. You begin the game lying in the street, after the FBI has taken your spaceship away to Area 51. From here on out, it is just you, your blaster, your reflexes, and your wits.

Traffic vs. helicopters.

The controls are deceptively simple. You can run left and right, jump, duck, and roll. You have two primary attacks: Your gun and grenades. Your gun can be upgraded with powerups you retrieve throughout the game, varying from rockets to a flamethrower to a scatter gun. There are several varieties of grenade as well, but they can all be used to destroy enemies and buildings, revealing more powerups.

Being an angry alien, you can also drop onto an enemy's shoulders and bite his head off, temporarily stunning nearby enemies into a horrified vulnerability. You can unlock an achievement by decapitating 50 guys in a row, but only if you can do it without using your gun or touching the ground! If you hit the attack button when you're standing next to an enemy, you will pull out a knife and perform a devastating point-blank attack, leaving only bloody chunks behind.

The only thing you need to fear are bullets, to which you are just as vulnerable as your enemies. You will need to jump, roll, leap from rooftops, and evade incoming fire like the lethal little critter you are. No lie, this game is tough. It's old-school hard and it will demand you bring your A game and all your attention. If you didn't have a good night's sleep and a big breakfast on this one, you're going to get spanked.

In the beginning you face off against monolithic slabs of tofu in suits: FBI agents. In the opening cinematics, one of them even steals an ice cream cone from a child on a corner, ensuring that any children you meet in the course of the game are on your side. They are your main enemy through the first third of the game. They are unarmored, and for the most part, they make up for their lack of imagination and ingenuity in attack by simply attacking you en masses.

The game is split into sixteen levels, set in three different environments: Urban (where you start), Russia, and Area 51, where you find out that the FBI knows a lot more about you and your people than you thought, and you are confronted with the results of their knowledge and research. To mix things up on the way, you will get to experience game variations, such as driving a car and charging through packs of enemies in a satisfying expression of road rage.

Who wouldn't want to ride a yeti?

As you progress through the game you will encounter new enemies, mid-level bosses, and of course, final bosses. Soviet soldiers will tunnel out of the snow to snipe at you in Russia, and you will go head to head with America's finest as you invade Area 51. Both are tougher than the FBI agents, and have a few tricks up their sleeves. There will be variant enemies, with tougher armor or deadlier weapons that are almost mini-mini-bosses. As you fight your way to the end you'll find that there is a lot more to this 50 MB download than you might have anticipated.

Alien Hominid HD comes packed with more unlockable bonuses and mini-games than any other game on Xbox Live Arcade. Challenge levels unlocked by beating certain stages of the game are there to test your skill and patience, and the alien packs a PDA along with his blaster pistol.

The PDA mini-games are worth the price of admission alone. If your junior high classroom doodles could come to life as a platform adventure game with 200 levels, you'd have something like the PDA mini-games in Alien Hominid HD. Other mini-games on the PDA include challenge levels from the single-player game, and stand-alone mini-games, like Super Soviet Missile Mastar, Neutron Ball, and Piñata Boss. Alien Hominid offers up more extra content than many whole retail games out there.

Alien Hominid has already wreaked havoc on other consoles, to say nothing of the web, but until now you couldn't play it in widescreen and high-definition. With extra content for Xbox Live Arcade, this game supports multiplayer co-op on a single console and via Xbox Live. The PDA mini-game is also Xbox Live ready, for both multiplayer play and future content downloads. Alien Hominid HD is the first of its kind, a recent current-gen console outing polished up, improved, stacked, stoked, and served up hot on Xbox Live for fast download. Get it today and enjoy this angry doodle come to life.

Article by Xbox Addict