Alien Storm was a Sega arcade game made by Sega's Shinobi Team released in 1990. It was the second game to use the "Sega System 18" arcade hardware. It came out one year after Golden Axe a very well known fantasy based scrolling beat'Em up and has a lot of similarities to it leading to people considering it to be the sci fi equivalent. Alien Storm likes to mix things up a little more than Golden Axe though as not only is it a scrolling Beat'Em Up, it also breaks up the action by occasionally offering up running Shoot'Em Up and Rail Shooting sections.
The arcade game allowed for up to 3 players to take on the role of one of 3 characters, a man, a woman or my personal favourite a robot. One thing I love about the game is that it has a very B-Movie sort of feel to it, and a sense of humour to match.
So you pick your character or characters depending on how many of you are playing and your tasked with the job of destroying the hoards of aliens who are invading the Earth. Many of the aliens are disguised as a variety of everyday street objects; such as telephone booths, oil cans, trash cans, mailboxes, and some of them are even humorously unconvincingly disguised as people. I have to admit that despite having played most of Sega's arcade games back when I was a kid Alien Storm was not one I can remember ever really seeing, as far as I can remember my first experience with Alien Storm was when I got a Japanese import copy of the Mega drive game. So in order to compare the Master System version I had to play a fair amount of the Arcade game via Emulation.
Alien Storm on the Master System tries its best to try and recreate the Arcade experience in the home with far less processing power but in order to do this things had to be substantially cut. Only two out of of the three characters from the arcade are available in this version the Robot and the Guy. The game also has less levels than its arcade counterpart but I will give it serious credit in that it manages to breaks up the Beat'Em Up action by occasionally offering up running Shoot'Em Up and Rail Shooting sections just like its arcade big brother, I honestly thought that at least one of these type of gameplay would be cut so I was very pleasantly surprised that this was not the case.
Obviously the graphics are incredibly basic when compared to their arcade counterpart. For an 8-bit version of this game though with the limitation of this system and the size of the cart they didn't do a bad job at all, the levels look unique, there are detailed, multiple characters, weapons and bosses not only this but everything is well presented. They made very wise decisions when making this game the choice of colours used throughout the game are sensible, everything stands out and there is none of that awful clashing you see in some low powered games. I think the sound in this game is great there are plenty of good quality sound effects but even more importantly Music plays throughout the game providing some very catchy tunes.
The Master system version has Simple yet effective controls one button shoots, another does a forward roll. if you hit the forward roll button then press the fire button you perform a diving attack. Which would be great but annoyingly, the hit detection is a little wonky and on top of this it is sometimes a little too difficult to line up your attacks an enemy will appear to be on the same plane as you yet you'll frequently have to shift a few pixels up or down in order to actually hit them with an attack this makes the game feel far more clumsy than the arcade version. Personally for me at least the parts of this game that are best are the rail shooting Operation Wolf Style sections, I think I would have ramped these up for this version as they are the bit that not only works best but feel the most fun. I would give this game a 5 out of 10 I think it was a valiant but flawed attempt at trying to recreate its arcade big brother which although decent in short doses just doesn't live up to the task.
Looking online a loose cart of the Master System version will cost about £7 which is not the worst price in the world for what it is... If you own Multiple systems then I would recommend that you get Mega Games 3 for the Megadrive a loose cart of this will cost around the same £7 but has the Awesome Megadrive version of Alien Storm on it which I have previously reviewed as well as the bonus of having Super Monaco GP and Super Thunder blade on it.
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