Firstly, it has to be mentioned here that Reloaded is a re-make of Alien Shooter: Vengeance that has been done by Sigma-Team in response to criticisms against the original. The revamp removes a lot of the restrictions in the gameplay, introduces a few new gameplay modes and also removed multiplayer features. The result is a game that is easier to appreciate than Vengeance, but it is not a thorough improvement either.
Secondly, Reloaded (and Vengeance) is officially a narrative sequel of Alien Shooter and its expansions, but there are many plot holes that even Reloaded, despite being a remake of Vengeance, did not bother to fill in. Therefore, like its predecessors, the story is just there as an excuse to shoot the heck out of anything that look inhuman, though it has to be said here that Sigma-Team did not promise a very engaging story (though its marketing blurbs would suggest so for the more presumptuous of people).
Anyway, Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded has the same story as Vengeance. It is set some years after the first game, but ignores the outcomes of the events in the expansions. Earth is still overrun with marauding aliens, but human civilization has managed to survive anyway. However, it has turned dystopian, with greedy but efficient corporations and experienced but unscrupulous mercenaries being the only chance that humanity has for survival.
That is not to say that there would not be trouble with their plans, and it is into one of these disasters that the player character is inserted into. M.A.G.M.A. Energy Corp., which is a corporation that specializes in new sources of energy, has recently released a can of worms as greedy corporations are wont to do, and the player character happens to be one of said mercenaries that have been hired to do the necessary clean-up. Of course, there are a few twists and turns but otherwise, the story is still just an excuse to have the player killing swathes of alien beasties.
The plot in the story mode may be inconsequential, but the gameplay is certainly not. In fact, the framework behind the gameplay in Reloaded is far different from that of the first game, among other aspects, and also differs in significant ways compared to Vengeance.
The first change is that in the story mode, the player character can be picked from a range of characters with different starting bonuses, such as a slow brute with more health than the rest and a spoiled rich kid who starts with more money than the others. These personality choices are inconsequential in both the short term and the long run, but it is still more sophisticated than the limited and practically pointless choices of p[layer characters in Alien Shooter and its expansions.
Of more value though is the perk that the player character can equip as one of his/her statistics. This can provide diverse benefits, like additional experience gain rate, more money from cash pick-ups and regenerating ability. These contribute most of the replay value of the game.
In the case of comparing Reloaded with Vengeance, there appear to be no changes in this aspect of the game.
A veteran of the first game would notice that the player character does not start with a default weapon with unlimited ammunition. He/She starts with a low-level pistol, but with limited but vast reserves of pistol ammunition. The first few levels of the game do not have powerful enemies, but they do have significant waves of weak bugs that will punish the player if he/she does not conserve ammunition when he/she can.
Another significant change is the graphical design of the game, which is too substantial to be described for now. On the other hand, it has to be mentioned here that aesthetically, Reloaded is no different from Vengeance.
The next change is a system with RPG elements that governs the progress and power of the player character. Unlike the first game, which used a rigid system of implants with discrete but few bonuses, the sequel uses a system with experience points and statistics that would be quite familiar to veterans of RPGs. Killing enemies garner experience points for the player character, which gains a level when a threshold of experience points is breached. Gaining a level grants the player some points to be invested into his/her character's statistics.
The statistics are where Reloaded diverges from Vengeance. In Vengeance, these statistics not only determine the secondary statistics of the player character, such as his/her health counter, but also his/her ability to use items like weapons and armor; for example, he/she needs a certain level of Intelligence to use certain advanced weapons and implants (which return as a miscellaneous category of items). Although these are understandable designs in a typical RPG, they are out of place in a game that is supposed to be about non-stop shooting and the freedom to sow mayhem with whatever weapon that is available, like the first game.
Vengeance was criticized for this, so the remake that is Reloaded addresses that by simply removing any equipment restrictions that are based on statistics. In other words, in Reloaded, the player can pick up and use any gear that he/she encounters throughout the game, which certainly results in a lot more freedom and is to the benefit of the player's experience with Reloaded. It does dash Reloaded's replay value, but replay value that is brought about by equipment restrictions is arguably artificial and of limited fun.
Unlike Alien Shooter, the sequel does not allow the player to have one of every kind of weapon stashed in somewhere on his/her person. The player character still can carry a sizable amount of weaponry, but he/she can only carry a sidearm, a shotgun, a machinegun, a missile launcher (or grenade launcher) and an energy weapon (or flame-thrower), which is a total of five as opposed to the ten that player characters in Alien Shooter can carry at any one time.
However, unlike the previous game, there are more than just one variant of any of these guns, so the player can indulge in swapping guns around, usually for the more powerful ones. This is not unlike hack-and-slash RPGs, it has to be noted here. That Reloaded has no restrictions on gear usage allows for better appreciation of the variety of weapons in the game.
On the other hand, Reloaded has done nothing to revamp some of the more underwhelming weapons in Vengeance. For example, there is only one grenade launcher in the game, and like its predecessor in Alien Shooter, it is rather flaccid. Reloaded did not improve it at all, neither did it introduce any new grenade launchers. The same complaint can also be said about flamethrowers, perhaps more loudly as the flamethrower in Alien Shooter is a lot more powerful than the two in Reloaded (and Vengeance).
The other categories of guns are also unchanged, but this is for the better. As the more powerful of these become available to the player, they also become more entertaining.
For example, the shotguns are initially based on real-world shotguns, but eventually progress to fictional automatic variants that look far more intimidating than the more believable ones. To cite another example, the player will notice that he/she will swap relatively puny submachineguns out for heavy machineguns and eventually autocannons and gatling guns.
The progress in missile launchers and energy weapons is even more impressive, as these have variants that do more than just do one sort of thing, in contrast to the other categories of weapons, such as only shooting bullets for machineguns.
For missile launchers, these start off with launchers that fire dumb-fire rockets. Eventually, the player upgrades to launchers that fire missiles that follow the mouse cursor, and finally to launchers that fire what are practically nukes (which do not harm the player character and allies). For energy weapons, they start with relatively meek laser pistols, but the player may replace these with long-ranged laser carbines and screen-clearing plasma cannons when they become available later.
These different variants of the same categories of weapons have different sprites within the inventory screen, but in the actual view, the weapons won't appear any different. This is because their appearance is dependent on the type of armor that the player character is wearing, and only armor changes the appearance of the player character. Reloaded does not address this issue that Vengeance has, unfortunately.
Armor in the game is less interesting than the weapons, but only because the selection is narrower. Initially, the player needs to only worry himself/herself with upgrading to the next tier of armor, but eventually the much stronger ones also happen to slow the player character down, which is not a good thing as some aliens can be rather fast and getting swarmed by aliens is a guaranteed death, regardless of how formidable the player character's armor is.
In addition, unlike weapons, armor can degrade. As they absorb and reduce damage from hits that the player character took, they will lose their own hitpoints, as depicted by the percentage that represents their durability. They do not, however, lose any effectiveness as their durability drops. However, the game will automatically swap the player character's armor for another if it has lower health, which is not necessarily a good design.
On the other hand, if the player is trying to preserve pieces of armor (which are lost if their health ever depletes to nil), the auto-swapping can be handy, at least in story mode where the player has access to an inventory system.
In the story mode, the player has to replenish armor mainly by purchasing repairs at vending stations. Repairs are not cheap, and they take away money that could have been spent on more beneficial purchases, namely better weapons. However, such designs do encourage the player to keep a distance from the aliens, which is ever a wise policy of course.
In addition to armor and weapons, there are miscellaneous items to be had, such as medical kits, extra lives, drones and goggles. These are actually holdovers from the previous Alien Shooter game; they even have similar designs.
The medical kits are still used automatically when the player is at low health, and they are still reliable and convenient as ever. The extra lives are still handy for covering up mistakes, though the game is not very hard, even at the highest difficulty (at which enemies are still stupid, as will be described later). The goggles are still needed to see properly for dark locales.
The drones are perhaps better at doing what they do this time around. In the first Alien Shooter, they shoot at any enemy within range, even if it is behind an obstacle that they could not shoot through, which made them an aural annoyance. In the sequel, they are much more conservative and a lot bigger too, which means that they are a bit handier at blocking incoming shots. Unfortunately, like their predecessors, they cannot be repaired in any manner. Also, they gradually lose their utility as the game progresses; eventually, enemies will become too numerous and too powerful for the drone to handle, and it will go down in mere moments.
In the story mode, all of the gear mentioned above are stashed away in a grid-based inventory system, which, again, would be familiar to veterans of RPGs. The space that is given is very generous, so it is unlikely that the player would run into shortages of space (unless he/she has been hoarding items instead of getting rid of obsolete junk). There is no way to sort inventory though, so the player has to manually arrange things, which is not convenient.
However, this is nowhere near as frustrating to manage as the game's system for ammunition storage. There are several types of ammunition in the game: pistol rounds, machinegun bullets, shotgun shells, missiles, grenades, cells and fuel. However, there are counters for only five of these, one next to the icon for each of the player's five guns in the inventory system.
This would not be a problem if the player's ammo reserve capacities are unlimited, but they are not. The player may need to sell away excess ammo in order to make space for any loose ammunition that the player may find later, but he/she can only sell ammo from those five visible counters. To access the other two, the player needs to equip a weapon that uses either of those ammunition types to make their counters visible. This can be quite a hassle.
Speaking of selling things, there is no option for bulk-selling either, which would have been handy for selling ammo.
For players who have encountered these problems in Vengeance, that Reloaded doesn't do anything to address them can be a disappointment.
After completing the story mode, the player will discover that there is no option to bring his/her player character into a new game; starting a new character simply overwrites the last one. Furthermore, this makes one of the perks that the player character can take quite worthless, namely the one that increases the rate of experience gain; it would have been a lot more useful if there is a "New Game Plus" mode, which Reloaded lacks. This is a lost opportunity for Reloaded to be an improvement over Vengeance.
The first Alien Shooter resorted to so much palette-swapping in the designs of the aliens that it was all too noticeable. Fortunately, Sigma-Team had put in more effort to visually differentiate a discrete type of alien from another in the sequel, or at least resorted to less palette-swapping. For example, the bug-like critter that appears early in the game appears to have only two palette-swap variants, as opposed to the first creature seen in Alien Shooter that has up to four. Even so, these two variants have different sizes and animation speeds, resulting in less obvious palette-swapping.
The bug-like creature would soon be joined by vicious giant slugs, reptiles that crawl on the ground with only two limbs each, and such others not seen in the previous games. Some creatures from the previous game do get recycled, but these are notably those that debuted in the expansions for the first Alien Shooter, which are generally better-looking than the original.
However, when comparing Reloaded with Vengeance, Reloaded does not appear to add any new enemies to the fray. They are also still as stupid as ever; they will do silly things like walking up against walls, among other acts that suggest lack of competent A.I.
The new content that Reloaded does offer to the game is a trio of new levels within a segment of the story mode that has the theme of sub-urban districts. Two of these are straight-up shoot-everything experiences that are more akin to the simple missions in Alien Shooter. This can be disappointing to players that had expected more of the missions in Vengeance, which are definitely more sophisticated than those in Alien Shooter. These new levels have nothing in the way of secret areas too.
However, there is a sequence in these new levels that may be of tremendous entertainment. In this segment, an unarmed but tough police car sits on the road, waiting for the player to commandeer it and use it to plough into the hordes of aliens that would be running down the road shortly after.
This is different from the segments in the original Vengeance that has the player commandeering a powerful armored (and armed) car or a nuclear-armed tank, but it does highlight the game's designs for collisions involving vehicles, which can be just as entertaining as gunning down aliens with vehicle-mounted weapons. It is unfortunate though that the death animations of aliens have not been updated to include new animations for aliens that end up being roadkill. Instead, the animations for gory deaths caused by gunfire are used instead.
For people that have played the original Vengeance, the story mode in Reloaded won't offer much of anything new in terms of narrative, except for the removal of restrictions and the few new levels as mentioned earlier. However, the other single-player modes of the game has been better expanded.
The Career mode in Reloaded is none other than the original survivor mode from Vengeance. It has been transferred over almost wholesale, and like its predecessor, can still be won by exploiting the stupidity of the waves of aliens and their inability to negotiate around the obstacles in the maps for Career mode.
(It is also worth noting here that with the removal of statistics-based restrictions in the Story mode, the Story mode in Reloaded is closer in terms of gameplay designs to Survival Career mode than the Story mode in Vengeance is.)
There is one new Survival mode that has the player controlling a gun turret instead of an actual player character. As in the original Survival mode, Gun Stand has waves of aliens coming after the player too, but the player character is of course not mobile. However, it is very powerful and capable of handling many waves before it gets overwhelmed. Moreover, every wave successfully defeated allows the player to upgrade a certain aspect of the defences that the turret has.
However, the turret and its defences cannot be repaired, short of upgrading them. Eventually, the waves will become too much for the player to handle, regardless of the upgrades that the player has purchased.
This mode is very challenging and entertaining, but it also highlights a problem with the game's collisions physics for aliens; this problem has been in Vengeance, but has not been addressed in Reloaded.
In the first Alien Shooter, aliens in a wave can end up getting caught among each other; the slower, larger aliens tended to be obstacles that the smaller ones have to move around, which is a tremendous effort for their lousy path-finding scripts. In the sequel, the smaller ones simply "push" into the larger ones, causing the latter to move faster than they should.
This is not a problem in other game modes where the player character is mobile enough to outrun all slow and large aliens regardless of how many creatures are pushing at them from behind. In Gun Stand, having these troublesome aliens come closer to the turret as a result of being pushed from behind by the smaller ones is to the player's detriment.
Another new Survival mode that has been added in Reloaded is "Stand Firm". It is actually the Survival mode from the first Alien Shooter, in which the player character is stuck in a wide-open map and enemies are coming in from all sides. The player has limited health capacity and there are far fewer power-ups in this game mode compared to the others. Moreover, like in the first Alien Shooter's Survival mode, the player can only obtain new weapons by killing a red alien that appears after a certain number of aliens has been slain, as indicated by the experience meter, which has been modified for this game mode.
Unlike Career mode, which can be successfully completed, Stand Firm and Gun Stand cannot be beaten, as the alien waves are endless and become worse and worse as each subsequent one is beaten.
It has to be mentioned here too that the game's mechanism of power-ups is only fully available in the Survival modes; the Story mode only has some of the power-ups that appear in the game. This may have been so in order to make the game more challenging, but if this is the case, then Sigma-Team would renege on this design policy in the later levels of the Story mode, where power-ups like Armor Recharges appear as balancing measures against the greater challenges.
The graphics and sounds from Vengeance have been recycled for Reloaded, so players who have played the original game would not find much of anything different. Yet, Reloaded is still one of the most beautiful games to use 2-D visuals. The uncanny lighting effects that alter the gamma rating of sprites seen in Vengeance is in Reloaded too, as are the multitude of sprites with significant numbers of frames of animation.
However, the visual problems in Vengeance have also been carried over. This is made all the more disappointing because these visual problems had also been in the first Alien Shooter.
For example, the player character is still composed of two sprites that are connected to each other but are animated separately. The lower body of the player character may appear to be in the motion of running, but his/her upper body may be using the frame for idle standing, which results in a visual oddity (that had been in the first game too).
Reloaded still has a fixed isometric perspective that obscures things that are visually under walls and large objects like trees; this is a problem in the first game. Yet, like in the first Alien Shooter, Sigma-Team has embraced this flaw and tried to exploit this to the benefit of the game by hiding secret areas behind obscured regions of maps. This may have been amusing in the first Alien Shooter, but it would not be so in the sequel, considering the substantial improvement in graphics that the sequel has.
A notable technical improvement that Reloaded has over Vengeance is that its files are better compressed than those for Vengeance. Where Vengeance took up more than one gigabyte of space, Reloaded only takes several hundred megabytes.
(It has to be noted here that this review is done using the Good Old Games version of Reloaded. The initial version of Reloaded actually omitted the voice-acting that is heard in Vengeance, when audio compression technology was not as sophisticated.)
The removal of multiplayer options is a change in Reloaded that is convincingly for the worse. Considering that Alien Shooter: Vengeance had some multiplayer options that gave it more gameplay variety over the first Alien Shooter (which was single-player-only), the absence of multiplayer in Reloaded is a regression for the franchise. More importantly, it reduces the value offered by this remake, which is a separate stand-alone product with its own asking price.
In summary, much of what is Reloaded has been recycled from Vengeance, which makes it a poor choice of a game for players that have already experienced Vengeance. However, for players that have yet to play any sequel to Alien Shooter and does not mind playing on his/her lonesome, Reloaded is the better of the two due to the removal of fun-reducing restrictions and some technical improvements.