Over the 10 plus years I’ve been writing about video game stuff, one thing that’s stayed constant is me writing about the most jankiest, clunky games out there, often in January. So much so that I almost considered making an event called “Jank-uary,” where people would play these particularly busted games as a celebration of the underdogs and trash of video game culture. Maybe I’ll still consider that in the future if there’s any interest.
Since it’s the start of a new year, what better thing to write about then yet another janky FPS? After all, might as well keep up my tradition of writing about this jank to start the year. This time with a developer I’ve talked about a few times in the past!
Alien Rage is a first person space shooter made by the present-day masters of budget label games: CI Games, the company formerly known as City Interactive. Released on Steam, the Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2013, the game came out to mostly uneventful fare, often being forgotten except by people like me who are a glutton for punishment as well as quality Eurojank™.
We’ve talked about CI Games/City Interactive twice before: Once in January 2019 when I wrote about the interesting-but-flawed Enemy Front, a World War II FPS that tried to be a bit more stealth-action like the old school Medal of Honor days; and again in April 2021 where I covered the infamous Terrorist Takedown, a rail shooter that was made during peak War on Terror, and for a long while was CI Games’ most iconic franchise before Sniper: Ghost Warrior came around.
Since I’ve played a myriad of the company’s work at this point, I know to go into this with the lowest of expectations. And boy those expectations were met and then some. The result is a game that doesn’t quite understand what it wants to be.
Taking place in the distant future of 2242 AD, humans find a new material named Promethium on a space rock, which they use to make a space colony. Then the Vorus, an alien race, come in and invade, taking over the Promethium, and starting a war between the humans and the aliens. Eventually the aliens burrow underground to further stop the humans in their tracks, and it’s all hinging on the help of one supersoldier named Jack to go in and eliminate the Vorus threat once and for all. Yep, in typical classic shooter fashion, they send one guy to do the job of a whole platoon. Though Jack is not alone in his journey, Jack is supported by an AI assistant named Iris and a soldier buddy named Ray. Guess you gotta give Jack someone to talk to, eh?
Alien Rage is a run-of-the-mill first-person shooter. Jack can hold three weapons: a sidearm and two human or Vorus weapons he procures throughout his journey. Standard WSAD controls for movement, left click fires, right click ironsights, F does a melee attack, and E is the catch-all use button, where Jack will activate keypads and climb over chest-high walls when prompted.
Middle mouse button activates a special alternate fire which changes for each weapon: A burst fire for the pistol, a grenade launcher for the SMG, etc. The player can hold a maximum of five of these overall, and can be used for any of the game’s weapons, so one must be careful when using them on a pistol rather than a rocket launcher.
Where the game differs is this: The game gives scores based on how well Jack kills things. Killing aliens gets points, and killing several at once or with explosives will have badges show up like it’s a multiplayer match of Call of Duty, complete with an Unreal Tournament-like announcer shouting out those medals.
The scoring is built into the game’s design thusly: Hitting certain point thresholds unlocks a perk that helps Jack passively, like increased health, increased damage with certain weapon types, and stun resistance. When the game starts, Jack doesn’t have any of these perks unlocked, and getting some of the more important perks require the player to grind for points. It makes some of the combat sections a bit less insufferable, but grinding for the good perks is a bit frustrating, which I’ll get into in a bit.
There’s also collectables to find. Jack will find these weird triangle-shaped things that will give him bonus points, audio logs that can flesh out the game’s lore – however little of it there is – and that’s about it. There’s no secret areas or levels, and nothing interesting like hidden weapons or abilities. After a while I stopped actively hunting these out, as the points I would’ve gotten for it wasn’t worth it.
On the surface, Alien Rage just feels like another shooter. Shoot enemies, try not to get shot, taking too much damage incurs the Bloody Screen™, that sort of thing. Outside of a few rail sections and a part where Jack pilots a giant mech, the game is shoot shoot shoot from beginning to end.
The thing is that even on “Hard,” which is the actually the game’s middle difficulty, the game does not mess around. Several times I died by the hands of overwhelming numbers just melting through my health while I dumped a lot of ammo into them, either taking forever to die or me getting lucky headshots instantly. And most of these enemies spawn from fancy teleporters on the floor, making it easy to predict when you’re about to hit a combat section.
Rarely have I played a shooter where the enemies were incredibly aggressive as they are in Alien Rage. The low level grunts and elites were eager to chase after me, even if I fell back to get ammo and such. The grunts have a stun ability, making me unable to attack and thus take a lot of damage and die. This is one of the rare shooters where it was a bad idea to rush past everyone. Instead I often hid behind cover and just blasted enemies as they chase after me. It felt like I was playing a Call of Duty game on Veteran difficulty sometimes with how ruthless the enemies were.
Then there’s the boss fights. Hoo boy, these were an absolute pain. While most of them fit the archetype of a classic FPS boss in a giant arena with a big bad and lots of supplies to take them down, they too were fairly punishing. I ended up constantly dying as I tried to figure out the trick of the boss, which often involved circle-strafing the arena while either dumping ammo into them or finding their glowing weak points to destroy them quickly. They at least break up the action, but a shame none of them are enjoyable or memorable.
I haven’t even gotten into the game’s look and sound. For a 2013-era game, the art style is passable but genuinely forgettable. So much blue, black and yellow. Lots of flashy transparency and particle effects. However, a lot of the locales blended together despite them trying to be different locations. The music is rather innocuous military-sounding music, yet the voice acting is surprisingly passable.
Our hero Jack isn’t properly credited, but judging by the tone and inflection, I’m hazarding a guess it’s Brian Bloom. I say this because Jack sounds like a literal dead ringer for B.J. Blazkowicz in the later MachineGames-developed Wolfenstein games. Now I can’t say if that’s true or not – places like Mobygames, IMDB, and Behind the Voice Actors don’t credit Bloom as the voice of Jack anywhere – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him. I wonder if someone at MachineGames played Alien Rage, heard Jack and went “That’s our B.J.!”
Jack gets a few decent wisecracks, as opposed to Iris the AI supporter, who loved referencing other video games as a wink and a nod to being an AI, and Ray being just an insufferable doofus. The rest of the voice acting is otherwise just there, nothing to really write home about.
As for the rest of the game, there isn’t much else to talk about. Throughout Jack is trying to stop the Vorus threat from stealing all the Promethium, and his only solution is blasting through everything. At times I felt like I was playing some classic eurojank like Alpha Prime, complete with the “people trying to steal important space material that helps the human race and Our Hero has to stop it” premise.
Even though I stopped the Vorus threat and beat a space spider and escaped, the victory felt kinda hollow. They sorta set up the end cutscene for a possible Alien Rage 2 but sadly that’s not happened yet, and since it’s been nearly a decade I think the “God of Alien Rage,” Michal Sokolski, will have to be disappointed that his creation ends after the first game.
Naturally like all video games these days, Alien Rage has a multiplayer mode, but it was exclusive to the PC version of the game – console versions just had the campaign mode. I tried to see if anyone was playing it, and found out it was a ghost town. Then again, I’m probably not missing much. And judging by how the more recent releases of Alien Rage bundled the game’s multiplayer DLC for free, under the banner of Alien Rage – Unlimited, I’m probably not the only one who didn’t care.
And that’s Alien Rage. Another unremarkable action game that’s confused on what it wants to be: A generic space shooter, a score-attack shooter like Bulletstorm, or as the game’s description says, an old-school styled shooter game. It’s an alright shooter, a mediocre and unremarkable score attack game, and this definitely doesn’t hearken back to the “old school” days of Doom and Quake. If anything, it feels like the “old school” shooter it’s styling itself off of are the Serious Sam and Painkiller franchises: Outright action fests with a score element. But I’d honestly rather play those games, even the more unremarkable ones like Serious Sam 2 or the dozen or so Painkiller expansions that aren’t very good. You know something’s wrong when I’d rather play less-than-stellar installments of existing franchises than this.
Though, Alien Rage also feels like it’s trying to hearken back to something else: That mid-2000s period of sci-fi FPSes. You know the ones, the ones that tried to capitalize on Halo’s success with varying levels of results. Stuff like Area 51, Pariah, and Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. Games that weren’t terrible, but hardly memorable unless you have a soft spot for more B-tier games. I don’t know if that was their intent, but it really feels in line with a lot of CI Games’ work: Hearkening back to the past, not realizing the gaming industry’s moved on from this kind of stuff being common.
Though, I will give CI Games some credit: They found their niche early on and pretty much stuck with it. That’s a bit commendable, but it also makes their games just blend in the background while other more interesting shooter games take the fold. But hey, if it works for them and they gain a small following, I can’t really complain too much. It just puts them in the same category as other companies like Rebellion Developments, where they’re known for a handful of franchises with a modest following, but nothing iconic or notable.
Alien Rage often goes on sale on Steam for about a couple of bucks, and with how cheap it can get, you could do much worse with your time and money than this. Though, I don’t think it’s really worth playing unless you’re like me and have a penchant for playing budget jank. Even then there’s more enjoyable jank than this. Basically, I’m saying don’t go in expecting greatness.
It’s interesting how I’ve now written about three genres CI Games have tackled in the many years they’ve been around: modern military shooters, World War II shooters, and space FPSes. I can’t think of any other shooter genre they haven’t tackled at this point. Perhaps one day I might need to play Lords of the Fallen, their attempt at making a Dark Souls-like game. I’m certainly ain’t playing any of their Sniper: Ghost Warrior games any time soon, that’s for sure.
Considering I played something unremarkable to start the year, perhaps I should write a more pleasing palate cleanser for next time.
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