Old school, duel stick shooter, that excels at creating a tense, alien filled atmosphere.
Maybe Alien Breed doesn't add anything new, but who cares. What you get is a game with good graphics, tense atmosphere, well used dark environments, and plenty of weapons.
What makes Alien Breed so tense is that your ship has been over run by aliens, and is in a state of disrepair. Most of you systems aren't working. There's minimal lighting, and you never know when aliens might appear.
There are several types of aliens, from small easy to kill ones to larger much harder to kill ones. The aliens remind me of anything from the face huggers in Aliens(these ones pop out of pods too) to the big insects from Starship Troopers. It's much like a cross between those two movies.
The aliens are everywhere, and can come at you from walls, through bursting out of the floors, to emerging from pods. This will keep you on you toes at all times, just because a room or hallway appears empty doesn't mean you can't be swarmed at any moment.
All the weapons in the game are pretty good. They all handle like they should. The flamethrower and assualt rifle being especially useful. You have an unlimited ammo pistol, which is ofter your best option to conserve ammo. I used the pistol in a lot cases, but switched to a bigger gun if out numbered or surrounded. If surrounded the flamethrower works best.
The atmospere and tension is what makes this game really. Playing on the hardest difficulty was the best way to play, as it adds to the tension. And I still beat it with enough healths and ammo left over that I didn't need to be as conservative as I was. There are plenty of save points, so save as often as you wish. This is especially useful on Elite as I restarted several times to approach a room with different tactics. There were times I got ambushed and had the wrong weapon for the moment equiped and I got schooled, so I just reloaded instead of wasting healths...not a big deal. Reloading doesn't take that long.
The faults of the game is that why you can rotate the camera at will, the cameral doesn't rotate with you neither. So when you're being ambushed from different sides it's can be a minor annoyance to reposition the camera. It really is a minor detail though. Also you can't zoom in on yourself..another minor thing. The co-op only allows you to play three of the five levels and you don't get the prologue storyline neither.
The last boss is rediculously easy to beat. He has a set pattern that isn't hard to figure out. And if you're good you can probably beat him without ever taking any damage (or minor damage) at all.
Gamespot said the ending is anti-climatic, but of course it is! This is only part one of a three part story. Each are 800msp. Each level can take you anywhere from 1hour to 1 1/2 hours to beat(depending on how fast you're tearing through the levels). So the total playing time is roughly six hours. not bad considering the cost of the game and the fact that a lot of FPS's these days eg. BF3, and COD aren't offering much longer campaigns themselves.
Once you get all three stories you'll probably have around 20 hours of game time. I think that's pretty good.
Anyway I recommend the game. I haven't played the second part yet, but I'm looking forward to it.