Review by: Bob Mandel
Published: March 15, 2004

Pure, unadulterated arcade action is what originally attracted people to virtual entertainment at the video arcades. All you needed was fast reflexes and lots of quarters; there was little value in strategic thinking of any sort. Now that the gaming world has appeared to have left that simple era in the dust, it’s with some surprise that a new retro-style science fiction shooter has been released. That title is Alien Blast: The Encounter, developed by Made by Kiddies and published by Strategy First. Can a mindless shoot-em-up succeed in today’s world of complex virtual recreation?

Alien Blast takes place in 2060 on a remote and isolated planet. Humans by this point have colonized the far reaches of space and seek to protect their far-flung civilization. The game begins with the crew of the commercial starship MBK-03 investigating a distress call from a world named Rexus and discovering that it’s a warning to abandon the planet. Soon, you find yourself under heavy attack, and it’s up to you, an Allied Force soldier, to defend entire planets and save the universe from attacking alien hordes. There’s nothing new about this plot backdrop, which plays a minimally important role in the gameplay.

Alien Blast is a classic turret shooter where you commandeer a large gun and swivel around, raise and lower your weapon to shoot an unending stream of alien foes that attack you on the ground and in the air. There are inherent limits in this type of action game. For one thing, you operate a stationary ground-to-air defense station, meaning you can’t dodge incoming shots or move around to strike your enemies by surprise. Furthermore, with a huge number of attackers at any one time and only one gun turret with which to fight them, you have to be more selective than you would if you had allies in where you focus your firepower.

Given the fixed position from which the action takes place, it’s not surprising that there’s not a lot of diversity in the physical settings you encounter as you progress. The differentiation among the turret environments is minimal, represented largely through the application of different color schemes, with a few background details changed for good measure. You could conclude you’re looking at different turrets in different locales, or alternatively that somehow the turret moves from place to place between levels to be right where the aliens are attacking. There comes a point after playing for awhile that you begin to wish that some more profound variety would magically appear, but it doesn’t.