Alien Hominid reviewed

The year was 2002 and the website was Newgrounds when Alien Hominid made his first appearance anywhere. It was the combined talents of Tom Fulp, the site leader who gave us the infamous Pico's School, and Dan Paladin aka Synj, who made several imaginative animations on the site. It was posted on Newgrounds and everybody just went crazy despite it being really hard, hard-to-follow and just having one stage but with more to come. But little did we know that that more was coming as a video game and not more installments on Newgrounds. So without further delay, let's dig in to the PS2 version of Alien Hominid.

You are this alien flying around in your little saucer when you fly towards Earth. This guy freaks out and shoots you down right into the middle of FBI territory. So now you have to go, find your ship and kill everything that stands in your way. Then the Russians steal your ship so you have to go to Russia and leave a whole bunch of dead Commies in your wake before Area 51 comes and steals your ship. So now you have to go and kill the Area 51 guys and then you get your ship back. Also, along the way you see kids with orange hats worn backwards who help you for some reason but I'm not complaining.

The controls here are fluid and easy to use. There's no weird configuration or any delay when you press a button, just good old fashion finger on the trigger action. And you will be shooting a lot of things because they never ever stop coming. This leads me to the difficulty level of this game. This game is pretty brutal in it's relentless ways to kill the alien. However, most of the time this is good difficulty, real difficulty that isn't unfair with it's camera screws or cheating AI. I do say most of the time for there are a few times that this game is a bit unfair. There's two levels where you have to mess up the highway and railroad tracks. You have to be aware of everything which is overwhelming resulting in you dying a lot. Also, all the boss and mini-boss fights quickly turn into a war of attrition as they have beam-spamming capabilities.

But if you beat the game(which will take a few hours at the most if you're good), then there's a few mini-games on there to keep your interest. There is a game where you're a Russian missile where you fly off to nuke America. I have no idea what the point of the game is or why I should be bothered to play it, nuking America does get old people. There's a challenge mode to get points on a few areas. There's a game where you have to get candy and you get candy by killing robots and a pinata. There's a two-player game Neutron Ball where you're playing violent soccer. The crown jewel of the mini-games is some game where you go from one door to the next, getting fruit and killing people. It's strangely addictive.

This game is pretty good, especially for first-timers like Fulp and Synj and the rest of the guys who made the games. There's always little details that one can see if you're willing to look hard enough. The game play is very entertaining and action-packed. It can be a bit hard at times but I do chalk that up to rookie mistakes. And in the end, this make me excited for any console game projects they make in the future like Castle Crashers(probably out now).

7/10