I usually find most good games can be lumped into two categories: either they are innovative but a tad buggy or they are polished but a tried and true formula. Alpha Prime is certainly the latter. You won’t find anything you haven’t done before but it is handled well and is enjoyable. It has parts of Doom; Red Faction; and a few others. The gun mechanics are solid though and there is a good variety of weapons. The lean function was great. I wish you could toggle aim and toggle crouch but you couldn’t. The graphics were not top notch even at release but it was solid for it’s time. Nothing was an eye sore for it’s era but it was no Far Cry in term of wowing me on release that’s for sure. The story wasn’t extremely deep but it was serviceable and knew to tell just enough to have reason to keep going. That being said a lot is made of Glomar and their heart but not a lot ox explanation is given as to just what it is or how it works. The music was a kinda typical soundtrack for an FPS game but once again got the job done. The voice acting was a bit stiff but not terrible. The one mechanic that was bad was the driving section. The handling on the buggy was just terrible. Luckily this was just one level and only lasted maybe a half hour. The AI wasn’t super great either as the enemies would block each other and had repetitive dialogue but they managed to provide a decent challenge due to lack of ammo on some sections and them doing a fair bit of damage against you even on the normal difficulty. The final boss however was extremely easy in comparison. Their one attack was easy to dodge and I had saved up enough rockets by the end that they didn’t stand a chance.
I played Alpha Prime on Linux using Valve’s Proton. The game never crashed but I did notice two bugs. First even though I turned subtitles off the game still had them. Secondly there was one time where the game made it so that I couldn’t advance. Basically I pressed the button to bring an elevator down but it never started moving. I had to reload my last save and try again which it then worked. The stairs were borderline a bug though as if you stopped moving on stairs you started slowly sliding down them but that seems like janky physics rather than a bug. You can manually save whenever you want and there didn’t seem to be a limit on how many saves you could have. There were three AA settings; three AF settings; and fourteen other settings. There was not a v-sync option though which meant my GPU was running hotter than it normally would have given the visual detail as it was churning out over 600 FPS at times. Luckily I didn’t notice any tearing. You can’t change the difficulty setting once you start the game. Performance was great as you can imagine from me saying that. There was one small supply room where the frame rate tanked strangely while inside of it but while strange the frame rate “tanking” was still above 60 FPS.
Game Engine: Enforce
Game Version Played: 1.3
Disk Space Used: 1GB
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Game Settings Used: 8x FSAA; AF; highest settings; 2560x1440
GPU Usage: 78-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1744-2463 MB
CPU Usage: 5-18 %
RAM Usage: 4.1-5.8 GB
Frame Rate: 65-610 FPS
Overall I would recommend Alpha Prime. It has some issues and isn’t overly creative but it is a fun shooter that is competent in most areas. I finished the story on normal difficulty in five hours and thirty six minutes. It is well worth it’s current price of $5.49 CAD, I’d go as far as $20 myself.
My Score: 7.5/10
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.0.0 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.2.8-zen1-1-zen | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz | Proton 7.0-6