I've tried 3 separate times to get into Alien Soldier. I feel I should love it, everyone else seems to love it. Yet every time within 30 minutes I've bounced off of it like a bodybuilder throwing a ball at a wall.

I suspect this is a me problem rather than a game problem. Alien Soldier does not ease you in and throws you straight in so that in less than 3 minutes you are fighting a boss where you can run along the ceiling. This game goes to 11 immediately and never slows down so you can get comfortable with the clunky and unintuitive controls. Whilst it does have an interactive tutorial menu it doesn't help when you're thrown into the front lines trying to remember what controls allow you to block, dash, change stance or bring up the weapon reel. Honestly this game feels ahead of it's time that it's trying to give so many options on a controller with so few buttons.

The whole game feels clunky in a way I don't have the patience to learn and adapt to. The weapon reel doesn't pause the game which would be fine if your weapons didn't (needlessly) run out of energy forcing you to swap at the worst time. This means you are guaranteed to receive a cheap hit like a trout to the face as bringing it up is slow and cumbersome, when you remember which button and direction do it. The levels have super tight timers for no reason, and resource managing your weapon energy on top is just a chore.

Despite my lack of enjoyment of actually playing this there is a great deal of charm here. The ludicrous story reel fed in a scrolling feed like Star Wars fan fiction, the huge chunky character model, the extreme fast pace, and colourful visuals are all great. I can see how people would like, nay, love this game when they learn the controls and mechanics so they are second nature rather than having to think then get an energy bullet to the face as I did.

+ Great visual and art design.
+ Fast paced non stop action.

- Does not give you time to acclimatise.
- Control system feels clunky and unintuitive.

Before I say anything else, I want to say that Alien Soldier is an extremely effective experience that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. However, given that backloggd scores are simply an average of user scores, I feel comfortable with giving this game a score that reflects my own level of enjoyment with it rather than a measure of its objective quality.

So much about Alien Soldier is perfect, but in a way I don't personally enjoy. Given the game's frantic pace I'm totally onboard with the weapon wheel not pausing the action, but I don't like how many frames it takes to appear - if I'm in the middle of a pitched battle I want to be like "A, left, left, go!" and not "A (wait) (get hit)". I also really dislike how getting hit by anything knocks you out of the weapon wheel. I really love your character's moveset - being able to swap firing modes a la Contra Hard Corps is a great option. Having a powerful dash attack available at full health turns your lifebar into a resource, and having the ability to turn enemy bullets into life bonuses gives you a nice risk vs. reward way of interacting with that resource. However, I prefer the way Gunstar Heroes encouraging expressivity with its large moveset, as opposed to how Alien Soldier seems to railroad the player into an optimal approach and loadout through its unforgiving time limit and with some weapons simply not working against some bosses. Also, while I'm no stranger to difficult games, I prefer games that gradually ease you into the masochism (see Rabi-Ribi and Contra) rather than throw you into the deep end of a hydrochloric acid pool like Alien Soldier does.

Then again, I did finish it! Alien Soldier is proof that games don't need to be fair as long as they are motivating - many of the challenges seemed downright mean-spirited, but the combination of the stellar presentation and tight gameplay kept me soldiering on. Alien Soldier is perfect for certain profiles of players: gamers in the 90s who would generally persevere far longer on games they bought, and people willing to sink a sizable amount of time into a challenge that brings supreme satisfaction to surmount. If you're not one of those people - say a casual scrub like me - too bad. Like the fabled honey badger, Alien Soldier doesn't care; it invites forces the player to play on its terms, take it or leave it. In my case, the terms were "I'll stomp your scrotum into the ground like a cigarette butt, then make you swallow your pride and select SuperEasy mode, then continue stomping anyway". And while my personal reaction to completing the game was "oh thank heavens, I feel so satisfied but I don't think I'll play this again", its general reception and average score vindicate it - I completely understand why this is a favorite of so many people on here!

Would that more games gave as few shits as Alien Soldier.

one of the best games I have literally ever played, consistently ahead of its time to the point where the rest of us probably haven't caught up

also nowhere near as hard as its reputation had me expecting! it is near-impenetrable at first but supereasy mode is plenty forgiving and it has a surprisingly well-considered difficulty curve, it ramps up pretty gradually with the exception of a few "wall" bosses to serve as proper skill gates, like sniper honeyviper, seven force, etc

I need to also point out that on supereasy there's a fucking manual slow-motion feature!!! the madmen including an accessibility feature that's STILL rare all these years later back on the mega drive... insane

I do almost yearn for a version of this game made for the genesis 6-button pad but the insane, unwieldy control scheme is better than it has any right to be and mostly serves as a reminder of how bold treasure were willing to be, and besides, only having to move your fingers between three buttons probably does help with how manic things can get

but yeah, game is a technical masterpiece and damn near perfect, anyone want to go 68000 THE HEART ON FIRE with me

Solo game development is a high-risk high-reward prospect. The developer’s dream game might not appeal to anyone else, or it may be crippled by the need for one person to exceed in all the arts of game making. However, if the game does manage to come together, you can get totally unique experiences that just exude personality. For Alien Soldier, it was the vision of a Treasure employee named Hideyuki Suganami who wanted to follow up Gunstar Heroes with the ultimate 2D shooter. Even though the Genesis’ hayday was over by the start of development in 1994, he wanted to make the definitive action game for it before 3D hardware had totally overtaken the market. That’s a tall task for one guy, but I would be confident in stating he succeeded with his design (but more staff came on to finish the project near the end, for the record). Alien Soldier really might be the best 2D shooter of all time, and you can feel Suganami’s understanding of the genre through all the mechanical polishes most people wouldn’t even think about. For example, most sidescrolling shooters either lock you in place as you shoot or force you to shoot in the direction you’re moving, but in Alien Soldier you can freely swap between the two to handle different enemies. You swap weapons with a weapon wheel, but since some players might push right to rotate the wheel clockwise, and others would push right to select the option on the right, there’s also a linear display to prevent confusion. In a nice touch for expert players, the health/ammo/damage bars can be set to either be graphics, numbers, or hidden entirely. These polishes still aren’t standard in 2D shooters, and most don’t have the smart pacing that this game does either. Alien Soldier has short levels that mostly serve as a way to recharge your health and ammo between the incredible boss fights, and there’s no wasted time or filler levels. It’s the ultimate example of an “all killer, no filler” game, it’s wonderfully imaginative and challenging from front to back. My only suggestion for when you play (and a hint at the game’s over-the-top personality) is to flip the difficulty from SUPERHARD to SUPEREASY, at least for your first playthrough. Hard mode is meant to play like an arcade game with its limited continues, but easy mode lets you just select a new set of weapons when you die, in case your current set is unsuited to the current challenge. It really is hard to talk about this game without getting into another one of those little polishes. I could gush about all the little things this game gets right all day, and still wouldn’t be able to convey how cool and fun this game is. Please play it, it’s $1 on Steam and easy to emulate.

Treasure are the kinda devs to make a weird obscure scrimblo run and gun where you play as a reformed, reincarnated terrorist alien anthropomorphic eagle with headcrushing thighs, rush development due to a rocky dev cycle and still come out with one of the best games in the genre. I'm genuinely at a loss for words, like it's evident the game was rushed and it busts your balls a bit in places and definitely requires some trial and error but once you get past that it just works so well in every single area. Plays just as good as it looks and sounds. Those bitcrushed mega drive voice samples give me immense joy.

(Deleted my previous review because I was able to actually beat it to avoid confusion)

This is it. This is the peak of video games. It has all been downhill from here. It is essentially the sidescrolling action game perfected to a fine, glistening sheen. You have so many movement options, so many defensive and offensive options, and a whole HORDE of fun and interesting bosses to use those said options against all with their own unique and different fighting strategies. All while pushing the mega drives hardware to its absolute limit both visually and audibly. This game is Treasure's magnum opus, which is saying something since that company literally doesn't miss.

Imagine you've mastered Shattered Soldier (or some equivalent) and you can now 1cc it regularly. Confident, you decide to show it off at some kind of event-- but upon beginning, your dexterity is seriously f u n k y and anxious confusion starts to gnaw away, followed by embarrassment.

Then you wake up.

Initially learning Alien Soldier was like running in a dream for me. Although I managed to complete it, the skill ceiling still looks awfully high.. and I love that.

Using Mischief Makers as a personal, relative example-- I've been playing that game for like 25 years (on and off). It's an exciting prospect to imagine that I could keep getting something out of Alien Soldier for decades to come. This one feels like a forever game for me. It might be my favorite aesthetic on the Mega Drive.

came for the bird man's design + another genesis game to try out, stayed for the top notch gameplay and overall high quality. not sure why the two crustacean bosses seemed to be the hardest, though. maybe this game came up with the concept of carcinization before it was cool.

the game's got a bunch of mechanics and polish that i wouldn't at all expect for its age. the amount of options it gives the player and the general feeling of play is surprisingly modern, and really just the console this game's on holds it back at times. i constantly wished this had released on a console like the snes or something later just so the weapon switching could make use of the shoulder buttons for seamless switching while giving the dash its own button now that it'd been freed up. while the radial-ish menu was really cool, i found myself fumbling around with it a lot because of my muscle memory of every other radial or ring menu i've ever used seeming to have the opposite reactions to pressing left or right compared to how alien soldier handles it. it's a bit jarring and i never quite got used to it, but that's hardly a fault of the game as this kind of menu wasn't at all standard yet.

that's pretty much all i can say about this game that's iffy. really, it's impressive how well made this is even despite it apparently being unfinished. i can see the more shady bits - stuff like the inconsistent difficulty curve and lack of normal enemy variety along with the stuff in the previous paragraph - but i don't think they're nearly enough to hold this game back from greatness.

i do think there should have been an intermediate mode figured out with elements of supereasy while still having the slightly harder enemies from superhard. i wound up getting to the lobster in stage 12 before tapping out of superhard, and it was only afterward that i found out it was effectively just 1cc mode whereas supereasy was more like a proper practice/campaign type mode. still, the way difficulty is handled in this allegedly unfinished game seems just fine enough, and either way you get plenty of challenge.

honestly there's a lot of good to say about this game to the point where you could call the vast majority of its qualities good by default. the music's great. the spritework's great. the animation's good. the ui is impressively customizable. the list goes on. the bottom line is that alien soldier is a joy to play.

if i'd make a recommendation, though, just be sure to skip the lengthy intro text crawl since it has no real bearing on anything. also, start with supereasy just for the sake of learning the game and getting passwords. trying to bruteforce through superhard is more tedious than anything else till you've actually practiced.

i was really not expecting a random game i chose for having a nice bird man on the cover would turn out to be so awesome. i'm glad i could end my night on such a good note.

this is a title that feels downright oppressive at first. your protagonist takes up an absolutely absurd amount of screen real estate; you have a wealth of complex techniques to master mapped to only three different buttons; there's six different weapons, not all of which are applicable in every scenario, and there are upwards of twenty different ways of representing your status and resources; the only available difficulties are SUPEREASY and SUPERHARD. this is unruly, frantic, and demanding, and you'll likely spend a fair amount of time dying repeatedly just to make heads or tails of the game because it shoves you right into the crossfire, before you might even be aware that the entire game is tantamount to a boss rush.

stick with it. conquer the game on SUPERHARD, no matter how arduous. it's the rare game that makes the most of every single mechanic on offer, where each design implementation is representative of an uncanny degree of fine-tuning and polish. i can point to any one detail in this game, no matter how consequential or intangible, and give you a sensible, informative, and well-articulated answer for why it was designed this way. doubtless the masters at treasure can, too. it's tooth-and-nail adrenaline-inducing frenzy condensed into an hour's run time

Alien Soldier is the very definition of Sink Or Swim. It doesn't care who you are or where you came from, you're not going ANYWHERE until you blast this massive, writhing, cybernetic worm thing all the way to Hell. If Shadow of the Colossus can be called a “Boss Rush,” then Alien Soldier is a “Boss Stampede.” A “Boss Bullet Train.” A “Hyper Boss Fighter II Turbo: Fight for the Future.“ Why nobody’s been hollering loudly about Alien Soldier’s greatness for the last two decades is seriously beyond me, though it’s probably because they’re all too busy evangelizing Gunstar Heroes (or — checks notes — Minecraft). Then again, as of my writing this, Alien Soldier already has a higher average rating than Gunstar Heroes on Backloggd.com, though, let’s pretend I’m not preaching to the choir for just a moment.

Somewhere between Treasure’s previous run-and-gun ventures and Sin and Punishment, Alien Soldier achieves actual, No-Really relentlessness. Barreling through setpiece after setpiece, packed with wild battles so frantic that your real-world cool-headedness becomes an active game mechanic, its manufactured setting takes on an air of genuine ferocity. It’s so videogame-y that, in the heat of the moment, its game-y-ness folds back on itself and becomes believability. The drama that emerges from its extreme white-knuckle “VISUALSHOCK!!” action grinds the nonsense story on the title screen down to powder. Rather than getting kicked back to a level select, you progress until you win or die. And “winning” puts every twitch action reflex bone in your body to the test.

Remember how, right at the start, Gunstar Heroes made you choose whether or not you’d be able to move while shooting for the whole game? Alien Soldier laughs directly into the camera, says “THAT was dumb,” reels back, and hurls the car keys your way at mach five. It’s your responsibility to work out When to do What. Select any four of six possible weapons to cycle between. Press the jump button in mid-air to hover in place. You can walk on the ceiling. Parry bullets to turn them into health blobs. Reach max health, and your invulnerable dash becomes a Fiery Death Charge. Because this is a certifiably Great Videogame, this damages you slightly. Here, the rhythm of Alien Soldier’s dance comes into focus. Swap modes, cycle weapons, fire, dodge, cycle again, hover, parry bullets, dash, and you might just live to fight the next unholy abomination. You can breathe when it’s over.

It’s a dollar on Steam.

Alien Soldier is a really cool game, and feels very ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The game's kind of difficult to get into because it just dumps you straight into things without much explanation, but once you actually start learning the systems of the game all of your abilities and weapons are really satisfying to use. Boss rush games don't really seem like something anyone was doing back when this was made, and it mostly does a really good job at it aside from some weird difficulty spikes. Stage 20 is brutally difficult and the few after that are kind of anticlimactic because none of them were anywhere close to as difficult, I even first tried the final boss (which was not very good imo). That aside though, really cool game overall, I could see coming back to this and trying to complete a Superhard run sometime.

(Note: If you plan on playing this game, pick up the Japanese version. It runs notably better than the PAL version Sega put up on Steam. You can switch regions from the Genesis collection once you put the JP Rom in the game's files.)

From the outside of it, Alien Soldier seems such a tacky and generic name for another Run N' Gun in the Genesis library, a game library that's just swarming with arcade-like shooters. When I booted the game, I was immediately greeted to an onslaught of text explaining this nonsensical plot to me for about 5 minutes. Then once I made it to the title screen and had a look into the options settings, I was given the choice to play the game on both "SUPEREASY" and "SUPERHARD". This has only foreshadowed what I was getting myself into.

Once I hit start, I had the option to select 6 different weapons which the game nicely showed me what they did before I put them in my four weapon slots then the game asked me how I'd like to display my characters info, how much ammo he had, and the enemies health, for which the game had 23 different options for, all can be toggled as meters, exact numbers, or to keep them hidden entirely. Action games to this day don't even have that much customization for displaying vital information. Then the game gave me a little warm-up room to show me the controls. You have a shoot, a switch that allows you to switch firing from in-place to freely move shooting, a parry, a weapon wheel, a full screen dash, and a jump. All of these only mapped to three Sega Genesis buttons.

I then actually got to play the game and the first run of it was rather loud. And I don't mean the music, I mean it was loud in every human sense possible. The game shoots you in immediately on the word go and you shoot everything at a million miles per hour at big alien creatures with explosions everywhere with a busy pixel-art background. You take some damage here and there, you learn your jump can stick to the ceiling, and not even a minute goes by and you encounter a big purple centipede boss before you have a full grasp on the controls, which at this point didn't really click with me yet. I then died to this simple centipede over and over which made me step back from the game to really practice the controls.

Then I beat the centipede and from there, the game shows its true colors.

This is not your simple run n' gun affair like Contra or Gunstar Heroes, Alien Soldier is a boss rush disguised as a Run N' Gun game. From even the first level, the game's moment-to-moment levels are short and are just there to serve as a way to reward the player with some health pick-ups or upgrades to their weapons or to introduce the player to new mechanics before the next boss fight. There's not a lot of fluff here, the game knows what it is and doesn't waste the player's time getting to what it shines in.

The game's controls and mechanics don't make a lot of sense at first, but sticking with it, any problem I could have had a solution to it. Weapon upgrades cycle between what weapon you'll get, but if you shoot at the tank with a weapon, it will automatically switch to the weapon you want. Health pick-ups are actually not limited to the levels, most of the bosses will often have projectile-based attacks that, if you parry them, will drop health. Not also it makes a lot of the fights in this game surprisingly fair, it's also an ingenious way of teaching the player to master its parry mechanic, which is vital to beating the final boss.

The weapon wheel feels confusing to look at, but there's also a linear menu on the top right that the player can look at to get a better sense of which way they should press to get the weapon they need. And you will be switching between different weapons a lot, as bosses will deflect certain weapons while being weak to others, making every weapon viable while not being the definitive weapon to use. They also have ammo, which drains faster if the player toggles the gold armor to move freely while shooting, so there will be times the player will have to be prepared to switch weapons.

The game's bosses are easily the highlight of the experience. All are animated very nicely and give audio cues to telegraph their attack patterns so the player can respond with a dash, a jump, or a parry to plan out their moment to attack the boss. They all hit like a truck, even on "SUPEREASY" but they never feel unfair. They all had strategies to them the player needs to plan out and master. They all are uniquely different in strategy and using the game's mechanics to the fullest, to the point where I can say this game has one of the best boss-lineups I've seen since I've played Devil May Cry 3.

This is all backed by stellar Genesis pixel-art and effects and a pretty good soundtrack. I normally don't like the Genesis sound chip because it either sounds like a lot of static in my ear or just plain fart noises layered over each other, but Alien Soldier uses the sound chip to its advantage, creating some kick-ass tunes on par with Sonic 3 and Knuckles.

There's a lot to cover here that I may have missed, but the bottom line is that Alien Soldier feels as if a Heavy Metal track had become sentient. It will constantly barrage you with loud vocals, guitars, and percussions that you may not get on your first listen. But something allured me back to it, and now I rock my head back and forth to what it sings to me.

I was surprised to see by the end of the game learning that the game was only developed by one man for the majority of its development, and even after getting a crew to try and finish it, the game was released only halfway finished. Maybe if the developers had more time, they could've had more time to maybe develop more stages or write up a less bizarre story. But as it stands, Alien Soldier feels more complete than 90% of the Genesis library. I will definitely be returning to this game more often.

Eu conheci esse jogo recentemente, não tem nem um ano mais ou menos, mas quando eu joguei ele pela primeira vez, eu senti que ele era um jogo diferente e muito único, principalmente pra época que ele foi lançado. É um jogo de Mega Drive, mas mesmo tendo que aproveitar de um controle de pouquíssimos botões, ele ainda consegue ter mecânicas maravilhosas e muito complexas, é um jogo que passa facilmente por um de quinta geração. Muito bonito, o visual dele é sensacional, a trilha sonora é bacana, e o mais importante é a gameplay, extremamente difícil (talvez além do ponto kkkk), várias mecânicas interessantes, super dinâmico e rápido, pra quem gosta de desafios e coisas desse gênero esse jogo é certeiro. Me surpreendeu muito vindo de um console como Mega Drive, como eu já falei ali atrás, a quantidade de controles que você tem é absurda, nunca ia conseguir imaginar poder fazer tanta coisa com um controle de só 3 botões. Jogo muito completo, pra quem tem console velho sobrando em casa fica aí a recomendação.

Why's everyone recommending to play on Super Easy on a first playthrough??? Alien Soldier is excess incarnate! It's the purest form of MDMA in the shape of 2D action! What, all of a sudden you want it to be tame? It's against the very soul of the game! It demands for you to jump into the meat grinder inside its cartridge and come out the other side all mushy, just to hop back into it once again.
Who the hell looks at the two settings "SUPEREASY" or "SUPERHARD" and doesn't instantly get the message!?

Alien Soldier is a bizarre game. It starts with a 4-minute text crawl describing all of its extremely over the top and confusing lore (which is detailed even further in depth in the japanese manual), but the actual game doesn't have a single word of dialogue in it. The character is basically half the screen's height, controls are clunky and a bit unintuitive and despite allegedly having "levels", they're basically 30-second bits of holding right while tapping the shoot button at your leisure, with bosses being the real meat of the game.

There's a method to the madness, though. The game isn't amazing at communicating this to you (Alien Soldier is definitely the sort of game where you'd really need to read the manual, or just look up a guide today), but it's one of the most nuanced and rewarding action games of the era. Every system feeds into another one. At full health, your invincible dash turns into a powerful charge that consumes some health. Double tapping the attack button lets you do a short range attack that turns bullets into health, which means that if you play perfectly you can chain the above charge and shred through most bosses. All the weapons serve a purpose, both firing modes have their own uses (you can shoot while moving or standing still, but the former wastes a lot of ammo and isn't always viable, though sometimes necessary), and everything about the gameplay is very carefully considered. I don't know how Treasure did it, but even today Alien Soldier is such a tight and well-realized action game that few can match it.

... At its best, anyways. It is unfortunately marred by a couple of pretty annoying sections, around the mid-late game. There's a couple of stages (read: boss fights) where the environment is completely dark, and you need to fire to briefly light it up. This is hard on the eyes and generally very annoying, but not a big deal. There's a boss battle a bit later on, against a transforming mech, that has five phases, with no checkpoint. No other boss has more than one phase, which makes this by far the hardest fight in the game, even compared to the overall simple final boss. A difficulty spike isn't in itself a horrible thing, but two of the phases use a really annoying, clunky "flying" system where you're constantly wrestling against currents, which takes a lot to learn and shouldn't be something you have to figure out how to wrestle with well into a hard fight. It's way more frustrating than any other part of the game, which overall flows pretty well, and while it doesn't ruin it is is a sore spot. Also, switching weapons, which you'll have to do a lot, is very clunky and often gets you hit, but that might just be a skill issue.

One last thing I'd like to note is that this game is surprisingly extremely friendly to newcomers. There's two difficulties, "SUPEREASY" and "SUPERHARD", which sound like they're miles apart but in reality they're the same in gameplay, SUPEREASY just gives you infinite lives. It also allows you to change the speed of the game, which is absolutely not something I'd expect from a 1995 game but extremely welcome, though I didn't really use it.