Back in 1995, when my parents came home with a copy of Alien Odyssey. You could not explain my reaction. I was shocked. I was soooo disappointed. Never seen anything about it, nor even hearing about the title. Well that was before I played it. It gets better, I was surprised.
Alien Odyssey lets you play the role of a humanoid who gets stranded on an alien planet. He soon, well very quickly gets involved in a war between the planet's natives and the Dak.
Your goal is to escape the planet and whilst doing so help these natives out.
After the quite impressive intro, you get straight into the action by befriending a native and try to escape the pursuing bad dudes. You cruise around on these hover bikes while blasting the enemies. Sounds Fun? Well not quite as it seems. You see it is like that you are on rails, so all you do is move the cursor and shoot, not controlling the bikes what so ever. It is at times frustrating and after the 50th attempt and seeing the same death cut scene over and over you might be lucky enough to past it. It pays off though.
The second level sees the hero and his new
friend inside the enemies complex. This level I enjoyed a lot. You will too if you liked Resident Evil, BioForge, those type of 3d adventure, puzzle solving types. The graphics here I must say were quite impressive for that time and age.
I found it easy (with the help of a strategy guide :-P) but for others it can be complex and time consuming. You see at first I was wondering around and not having any sense of directions on where to go. But it is adventure I did say.
The 3rd brings back the vehicle level, well not the hover bikes again but a well armed well equipped robot blasting, tank like machine. This level I found it the most fun. Too easy I reckon but fun.
After all the blasting, we go back to the adventure style gameplay again. Then thats all...
Alien Odyssey is a very short game, with only 4 major chapters. That difficulty is the thing that keeps the game going for longer. Like I said earlier it can be frustrating and repetitive. The Adventure parts are try and error at certain points, and watching the same death scenes over and over doesn’t help too much with your patients. If you ask me if it’s worth it? We’ll I wouldn’t go spending $80 as like my parents did on this, but if it was free to download... then why not? It’s free.
