Alien Hominid HD XBLA Review

Today's review is Alien Hominid HD. This game was released waaaay back in the early days of the Xbox 360 launch, which is about when I first bought it. I had heard good things and decided to take the plunge only to find myself way out of my depth. Alien Hominid HD seemed hard and unforgiving in a way that I wasn't ready to deal with at that point in my Xbox 360 life. Upon returning to it almost 4 years later I found that I was mostly mistaken and managed to get through all of Alien Hominid HD in a few days. With the exception of a couple of frustrating achievements I found Alien Hominid HD to be very enjoyable.

Overview
Alien Hominid HD started out life as a flash game on Newgrounds. Alien Hominid  was a cartoon fun, fast take on the classic run and gun action games like Contra. Behemoth decided to port the original game to the XBLA making it the high definition Alien Hominid we now have available. You play as an alien initially shot down by the United States to find yourself in a world of problems as you battle your way through FBI agents to regain your ship and try to escape this hell hole called Earth. Things are obviously not as easy as all that and you find yourself facing off against stronger and stronger foes in your quest for freedom.

Alien Hominid HD also includes a bunch of minigames, for you to try your luck at. Some are completely different than anything you'll experience in the main Alien Hominid game. One of these games is Super Soviet Missile Master, which has it's own achievement related challenge. This tasks you with flying a missile towards the US dodging obstacles in between and is reminiscent of an old Atari 2600 game.

Rational

Alien Hominid HD offers non-stop action

When you first start Alien Hominid you are thrust into the game with most of the options hidden away from you. This is the main reason I fled from Alien Hominid HD those many years ago. When you start a new game there are no difficulty options to pick, you just go. This confusion led to frustration and eventual surrender. The difficulty options are available to you in the options menu, make sure you take a trip there before picking new game. I would recommend running through on easy, as even easy posed some difficulties for me, though I really am not trying to present myself as an expert on this type of game because I'm not. Easy is enjoyable and offers just enough resistance to you as you get used to how the game controls and what it is asking from you.

There's a co-op option and many different mini games

Once I'd completed Easy I felt like I had a decent handle on the gameplay mechanics and I did a little better on the harder difficulties, but even then I was dying a lot and I didn't find Alien Hominid much fun anymore. If my first experience with Alien Hominid HD would have been the experience I had those many years later I wouldn't have avoided playing the game for so long. It's hard for me to be too negative on Alien Hominid as it was released so many years ago, but you can tell. The way the game moves and how the graphics look, they aren't near as sharp as those we've experienced in the years since Alien Hominid HD's release. Even the later releases by Behemoth blow Alien Hominid away.

The last gripe I had with Alien Hominid HD is that I felt the game never really told me how I should play it, or introduce any tactics to me. I wasn't making much progress until I found some guides that gave me a much clearer idea of the gameplay flow. Again this is another sign of Alien Hominids age, which is funny as I've played quite a few re-releases of older games and it seemed like most of those explained their gameplay just fine.

Head biting 50 enemies without touching the ground was one of the most infuriating achievements I've gone for

Summary
Overall Alien Hominid HD is a demanding game that people will get some fun out of if they have the dedication to learn how they should best play it. Running and blasting can be fun for a while, but when you really learn how everything is meant to work you make much faster progress and the whole game becomes more enjoyable. I can't say I recommend going back and picking this game up if you missed it when it was released, but it is worth taking another look at if you moved on prematurely like I did.