[u]Recommendation[/u]: It's a little game that reminds me of several fun 8-bit games of the early 80s.
[u]Review[/u]: [u]Alone on Mars[/u] is a simple platform game in which you have to collect time-limited power-ups to be able to kill the waves of monsters fast enough that the base you are trying to protect (a power generator?) isn't destroyed. The action is very simple: shoot to the right, or shoot to the left, as you run around on platforms grabbing a gun power-up (each gun has both a magazine and a firing rate of varying size) to boost your killing power/speed while avoiding alien monsters that will happily attack you if you get within reach, but will otherwise head for your base to attack it. In trying to defend your base, it feels like Space Invaders or Centipede. In moving around the levels, it feels like Mario Bros (not Super Mario Bros: I mean the original Mario Bros where you played a plumber jumping around on platforms killing turtles that came out of the pipes). Each level is frustrating at first, but as you learn the patterns of both alien movement and the locations that the gun power-ups sometimes appear, what seemed impossible at first becomes doable. They key is to figure out what the "choke points" are in each level: where you are both close to several weapon spawn points and where the aliens MUST come through regardless of where they start. If you can do that, you have a very good chance of completing the level.
[u]Critique[/u]: This game is [i]rough[/i]. The basic gameplay is solid, but there are so many very simple little things that would make it so much better that are completely missing. It doesn't reward you in any way, it provides almost no information that would be useful, and the controls are flat-out TERRIBLE. But there is still a nugget of a fun game in there, and sometimes you can find yourself enjoying it. The sound effects are HILARIOUS: in many cases, it is a person making "pew-pew!" and "krssh!" noises. This feels very silly at first, but after a while the sound just fades into the background. That's it for sound, though: there is no music in the game at all (at least not in the first few levels).
When you start the game, it opens in a window. There is no way to configure this in-game, and playing in a window is more problematic in this game than in any other game I've ever played in my life (more on that later). When the game window opens, there are three options: Continue, New Game, and Exit. There are no options for settings, no difficulty levels, no credits. There is also no instruction in the game at all; you have to use trial and error to figure out both how move through the menu to get to "New Game" (hint: the mouse doesn't work for [i]this[/i]), and trial and error to figure out how to select "New Game." Once you start a new game, you get a sort of a cut scene reminiscent of old 16-bit games (a static image with scrolling expository text) which explains that you are trying to investigate why all contact with a colony on Mars was lost. The game begins, but the controls that you just used to navigate the menu? They don't do anything here. You don't know how to do anything in the game, nor do you know WHAT you are supposed to do in the game. The cut scene said you landed in a spaceship, and that the first thing to do is to find the generators. Then, as the level begins, text reads "Protect the Generators!" You appear on a platform: a little spacesuited figure carrying a four-shot gun that looks like the Federation rifles from "Blake's 7." But you still don't know what to do with it. Will you be picking up cans like in Commander Keen? Do you need to repair the generators? How many generators are there? There is a health bar for you that has ten or twelve segments in it, so presumably you will be in danger that might result in damage: presumably whatever you are trying to protect the generators from may harm you, too.
Once you figure out how to move (it's A and D to move left and right, respectively, with W for jump), exploring the level doesn't help answer those questions. A little aura of light moves with your spacesuited figure, and every once in a while there will be a little circle of illumination throughout the level. But on all the platforms, there is no spaceship. There's a bunch of crates which you can't interact with in any way (when they are stacked, they look like a wall, but it's important to remember that you can walk right past them). There is a box with a red health bar over it (which looks completely different from your health bar, which is a sort of silver arc divided into ten or twelve different sections); maybe that's the generator? It's hard to say; there's no label, no pop-up text saying "OK, now I've found the generator, now I've got to ______" and you don't know what you're supposed to do with it. Here's another hint: there's nothing that you need to do with the generator. Though the game repeatedly says "generators," please note that every level that I've seen has only one generator.
Several seconds after the game begins, you will have to understand all this stuff. Because at that point, the first wave of aliens will appear and begin making their way to the generator to destroy it. As the game continues, in random locations and at random times, a bunch of alien monsters will appear throughout the level. Aliens will attack when they are adjacent to you, depleting your health bar, but they will not chase you and in most cases you can jump over them (that is, it's [i]possible[/i] to jump over them: the controls are very awkward and it's much easier to just run past the monsters and take a miniscule amount of damage than it is to jump-and-then-move to clear their heads). Somewhat helpfully, at random times the little circles of illumination are sometimes filled with healing packs or alternative weapons. If you press E while in front of one of these, you will temporarily swap your basic 4-shot rifle for the new weapon. A countdown timer appears, showing you how long you have before the new weapon disappears (it's between 20 and 30 seconds). The aliens are funny; while some are fast and some are slow, they all move exactly the same way. The monsters will continue in the same horizontal direction until they hit a wall, at which point they reverse direction and keep coming. The only way to stop them is to kill them. When you kill all the monsters in a wave, you've completed the level. If the monsters kill you or destroy the generator, then you lose.
There's at least six problems with the way all that's been implemented here:
1) You don't know where monsters will spawn
2) You don't know how much health an alien has
3) You don't know how long any levels last
4) Weapons only spawn in certain spots, but they don't predictably spawn, and they despawn after a few seconds
5) You don't know what the weapons do until you use them, but they don't matter. Every weapon is better than your default one, and is necessary to win the level.
6) You shoot by left-clicking the mouse
Biggest problem is that the mouse cursor (invisible in game) will move out of the window and click on stuff on your desktop, opening new applications and/or bringing stuff in front of the game, [b]which does not pause[/b]. So you will lose a few seconds every time this happens.
There is fun to be had here, but the total of all the control, interface, and ignorance problems add up to a frustrating experience I can't recommend.
