A fun arcade experience with enough extras to warrant a purchase.
User Rating: 8 | Alien Front Online DC
Alien Front Online was the first Online console game to have voicechat. It was pretty basic- old walkie talkie style (hold the button down, say a few words, slight delay) but it was sweet when it came out. Another Sega innovation that was too far ahead of its time to make a solid dent in the industry. The online play was solid 95% of the time, with the ocational pop or respawn lag with up to 5 on 5. GAMEPAY- This is a War of the Worlds style game where aliens are attacking earth. You can chose the human or alien tanks to do battle with. Each team has 3 differnt vehicles to choose from. A quick, weak, low defence tank, a middle range or a slow powerhouse. There are two modes in 1 player, Arcade and Mission. In arcade you simply fight a seemingly endless army of aliens (or vice versa) In mission mode, there are about 25 differnt levels fo each side. Gameplay ranging from destroy this many targets without dying or protect this object for a set amount of time or safely escort a vehicle across the level, etc. The action is feirce and exaggerated with huge explotions and insane weapons. Each vehicle has a base weapon and a secondary that runs out. The secondary is a powerup that can be picked up in different places in the levels. The secondarys range from heatseeking rockets, to machine guns, to a one shot mega nuke. (love that one) and of course the aliens have their own weaponry- like the anti gravity explotion beam. (the worst one to get hit by) The environments are destructible alowing you to 'make your own path' in many areas. My main issue with this game is the fact that you cant play multiplayer offline. This would have been a very fun 1 on 1 split screen game. GRAPHICS- Personaly, I think this game still looks good. It helps that there are no recent arcade style tank games to compare it to. Solid animation for all vehicles. They all take damage and rattle and smoke when low on health. It would have been cool to see the tanks parts fly when they are destroyed instead of a 1 frame pop to the busted model. The levels are relatively small allowing greater detail in the individual areas. The locations range from the capitol in Washington to Down Town Tokyo, the the desert, to the alien planet surface. The particle effects are all decent and the onscreen destruction is awesome. The little 2D sprite ground troops are pretty cheesy looking but are a blast to run over. "Crunch". SOUND- The sound is surprisingly good. Some of the songs are overly dramatic or basic, but the vehicle and weapon sounds are very convincing. That mixed with the background destuction usually drowns out the bland songs. The computer voices are pretty lame, but dont detur from the overall imersion. VALUE- Its a shame that Sega had to close down the DC servers, killing the online aspect of this game. With no offline multiplayer, this is now a 1 player only arcade game. Pretty lame. If you are looking for a fun challenging arcade game with lots of fun exaggerated destruction its worth picking up. This and Crazy Taxi are the two DC games I still play when I need a quick action fix. You can probably find it for under $10. (dont worry about the microphone, its useless now) IN THE END- This game was fantastic when it came out. Without multiplayer it has lost some of its flair. Regardless, 5 years later, this is still by far the funest tank game on the market. If you like quick, over the top action and tanks, this (and the classic Mass Destruction) delivers the goods.
