Codename: Outbreak
It starts with the basic story ingredients: Aliens — potentially copyright-infringing face-huggers…err, skull-huggers — have attached themselves to personnel at science stations who were researching a recent rain of meteorites. It’s up to your two-man squad to investigate and neutralize the outbreak over the course of 10 missions.
Developed in Ukraine, this game has some of the worst translations and voice-acting heard outside a console RPG. (Imagine, if you will, Prof. Hawking with a Russian accent, only not as emotional.) The missions themselves are competent, and occasionally even fun (for example, I like that you can select to play during the day or night), but the game itself doesn’t quite seem finished. It’s buggy, the squad path-finding is woefully unreliable, and the graphics alternate between decent and Nintendo 64–ish (which is bad). At least you get some standard multiplayer options, exclusive multiplayer maps, and a two-player co-op story mode.
Codename is $20, so it’s true that you get what you pay for. But since it liberally cribs from better games that are now selling for $20 or less themselves, you’d be a fool not to check them out first.