Alien Breed – Team17 - 1991 - First time playing?: Yes!

Xenomorphs? Never heard of them. This is Alien Breed. Entirely original.

Well, jokes aside, this inspiration is hardly noteworthy, considering that nearly every arcade sci-fi game released in the 80s to early 90s was essentially an unofficial adaptation of Aliens, such as SEGA’s Alien Syndrome for example. Alien Breed almost feels like a fan sequel to Alien Syndrome of sorts, and as Alien Syndrome is both a game I enjoy and also a game lacking in many official sequels, I’m on board with this.

Team 17 were experts when it came to creating arcade-style action games with smooth framerate and screen scrolling on the Amiga, with Alien Breed being their flagship series before they made Worms, but during the start of their career they also ended up in something of a habit of releasing a game, discovering that they made it entirely too hard, and then later on releasing a budget, rebalanced Special Edition of the game that could more cynically be classified as “Playable Edition”. Alien Breed was one such example. I actually bought the Special Edition online, imported it from the UK, but when the parcel finally arrived I opened it up and discovered I was sent the original release by accident. Oops. Well, I think I’d like to try the original Alien Breed first anyway. Ultimately, the original version is something of a landmark release after all, so if I’m covering Amiga game history, this version of Alien Breed is important too.

The story is… just look at the title screen again. Yeah, there’s an entire floppy disk dedicated to an intro cutscene, but the second you saw the box art and a screenshot of the game you already knew what the story was. The federation lost contact with a research station, two not-colonial marines go to check it out and figure out what the cause was, turns out the cause was aliens, and the federation would really rather there not be aliens there, so now you gotta help the marines blast the hell out of everything, destroy the entire station, get home and then have the beer that they'd much rather be having right now. It's fine, it's an arcade style run & gun, the story isn't that important here. The most important thing of note here is that one of our protagonists is described as an exhibitionist and that's hilarious. I called him a marine, but maybe he's actually more of a commando.

Controls are pretty simplistic. This is yet another Amiga game designed for single button controllers, so moving and shooting is about all you can really do without reaching for the keyboard. Keystrokes are later used for bringing up the map screen and switching weapons once you obtain a map and extra guns, but at the start, move and shoot is all there is.

Alien Breed isn't a twin stick shooter, so you can't for instance move in a direction independent of the direction you're shooting in. Your player character will always turn to face the direction he's walking in, even if it may take a few steps before he fully turns around if you're doing a 180 degree turn. As a result, aiming towards the aliens you want to shoot requires taking quite a few steps towards that approaching alien first so that your gun is pointed at your target. You don't have any kind of backstep function either, so you'll need to turn away from the attacking alien in order to retreat. It's clumsier than how a modern top-down run & gun would do things, needless to say, but it's manageable.

Well, it's manageable once you get a new gun. The basic xenomorph-esque aliens you're commonly fighting against are surprisingly tanky, taking quite a bit of continuous fire to bring down with your starting gun. Not only that, but aliens explode after you kill them, and that explosion can also damage you and even block your own attacks. Yes, the explosion is so solid that you can't even shoot through it. Now, I’m aware that by saying the aliens are tanky, it might sound baffling to you if I then follow that up by stating they tend to go down in roughly 1-2 seconds of continuous fire, which sounds like absolutely nothing, but…

Yeah, that gif is from the first level of the game. Aliens spawn in infinitely from off-screen and they spawn in fast, to the extent that by the time you’ve finished shooting a single alien it’s common for two more aliens to have already spawned during all that continuous fire. I’d ask where the hell all of these aliens are coming from, but then I remembered the game is called Alien Breed and I realised what an immensely stupid question that is. This is also why not being able to shoot through explosions sucks, since that further slows down your slaughter and results in even more aliens spawning in.

The game became much easier once I discovered how valuable the shotgun is. A weird quirk of Alien Breed’s weapons is that most of them do not behave in the same way you'd expect them to based on what they're named after. The flamethrower for instance. Would you ever expect a flamethrower to shoot reflective shots that bounce off of walls? Because that's exactly what the flamethrower does in Alien Breed. Likewise, the shotgun does not fire a burst of shrapnel with some spread to it, but instead shoots a single wide wave projectile that pierces through enemies. The shotgun blasts phase through aliens while damaging them, and continue to deal damage to anything else they pass through behind said alien. This also finally allows you to shoot through the explosions from the alien death animation, so this is a huge help in managing the massive swarms of infinitely spawning aliens that are so overwhelming with the starting gun.

Ultimately however, the challenge of Alien Breed isn't in the moment-to-moment combat, but instead in the emphasis on resource management. Unlike Alien Syndrome, you have limited ammo in Alien Breed, and running out will leave you completely defenceless, without even a weak melee attack to tide you over. Ammo pickups are finite and fairly rare, and when you combine that with the infinitely spawning swarms of enemies, your guns running dry is the biggest threat to your continued survival. Not only that, but several ammo pickups are hidden behind locked doors that can only be opened by consumable keys, and those keys are also a finite item. You won't be able to open every single locked door in a level with the limited amount of keys present in every level, and if you choose to use your limited keys on a door that leads to a dead end with some ammo and nothing else, you may end up stuck without enough keys to actually make progress towards the level objective.

But ammo and keys aren't your only resources, as you've also got credits. These are your currency that can be spent at the Intex computer terminals scattered throughout every level. Using credits, you can purchase extra ammo, health, keys and even extra lives. The catch? Spending credits is also the only way you can get new weapons, and weapons are expensive. Any time you're required to buy keys or ammo, that's setting you back from your goal of saving up for the best guns. As a result, there's this interesting risk vs reward kind of resource management going on throughout all of Alien Breed. You can scrape through levels without spending credits, but you'll be far more tightly strapped for keys and ammo and will have to pass up on a lot of the optional rooms that give you more resources but don't help you make progress. On the other hand though, getting a new weapon may also help with resource management as the more expensive guns are able to kill aliens faster with far less ammo consumption. All weapons share the same ammo pool, so the less shots it takes for any gun to kill aliens, the better. As you replay the levels more and more, learn the layouts more and know where you can get the most keys and ammo while also crossing the least amount of locked doors, buying keys and ammo from Intex becomes gradually less and less essential, allowing you to bag those new guns faster, but while you're still learning the most optimal route through each level for your playstyle, the extra keys will go a long way, and the ammo will ensure your survivability. There's a surprising amount of strategy to the game in spite of its simplistic mechanics as a result.

Oh yeah, you can also play Pong on these computer terminals. A full, 15 point game of Pong, just included as a little extra in this hard alien game in case you need to cool off. The aliens just patiently wait and leave you be while you do that. Maybe they’re mesmerised by your primitive human video games and want to watch, or maybe they want to play with you. How cute! A shame that your new gaming buddies won’t survive the eventual destruction of the station, though. For the good ending, just play Pong till the end of time.

Alien Breed seems to be going for something of a proto survival horror kind of vibe, which makes sense as Alien Syndrome has traces of that as well. The resource management of Alien Breed however brings it closer to the more modern understanding of the genre established by the likes of Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. There's a few design choices that I think are immediately questionable, but could make sense if you're trying to build suspense and tension. For instance, the HUD. It's slow to update, with your health bar slowly decreasing pixel-by-pixel whenever you take damage, lagging behind your invisible HP value that’s updated instantly upon taking damage. This is irritating since it makes it hard to tell exactly how much HP you currently have left after an attack, but that also raises suspense as you see your HP slowly tick down after a single attack, and you're left wondering exactly how much damage you actually took in that last encounter. Personally, I'm not a fan of game mechanics being made intentionally annoying for the sake of creating a survival horror atmosphere, but it's at least an interesting idea, for what it's worth.

The atmosphere and sound design is also clearly aiming for a horror atmosphere. Most of Alien Breed uses ambient sound in place of background music, with the whirring of machinery and beeps of those adorably low-tech 70s sci-fi movie computers that in spite of being from the future are still running MS DOS. If you're not going to have music, this is how I prefer it to be done. Pure silence in my opinion is nowhere near as atmospheric as this kind of Tomb Raider esque ambient sound. There is however music whenever you're fighting a boss and escaping to the lift after setting off the self-destruct sequence, which nicely sets the panicked tone of the level’s climax. I still kind of wish there was some more music, however, because the title screen’s music is absolutely fantastic and I'd love to hear more stuff in that style. Yet another Allister Brimble win.

Right, bosses and self-destructs. With the exception of the first level, your objective in every floor of Alien Breed is to find and kill the boss, activate a destruct sequence and then make your way back to the lift in order to escape before the whole floor blows up with you in it. The bosses are all pathetic and are of no concern at all. The first boss can be defeated by standing completely still and shooting diagonally down, while the rest of the bosses against large aliens are completely identical to one another. They can kill you in a single hit, but they have no attacks other than dealing contact damage while scuttling across the screen like a crab. Furthermore, every single one of them is incapable of touching you if you just hide in the bottom left corner of the arena you fight them in. It's lame, but given the difficulty of the rest of the game, they're almost a relief.

The self-destruct sequences are more of a problem. In most levels, you have 60 or 90 seconds to escape the floor. The route you took to the self-destruct switch typically is not the same route you can use to escape, as levels are filled with one-way electrical gates. You can safely walk through these gates in the direction the arrows are pointing on the floor surrounding the gate, but if you try to walk against the arrows and pass through the gate from the other side, you'll be electrified and killed instantly. There's also fire doors; big, heavy, indestructible doors that close shut if one of the fire alarms next to the door is shot. Once these doors close, they never open back up, and this can be fatal if you're in a rush to escape and don't have the time to take a detour. They're extremely easy to shoot by accident, especially with the shotgun due to its wide projectiles and ability to pierce through enemies, and all it takes is one misaimed shot scraping a fire alarm to completely undo all your work. Worst of all, if you don't escape before the self-destructs timer hits zero, you don't just lose a life and start the sequence all over. No, that's an instant game over, regardless of how many lives you have. All your progress is wiped, just like that. The red filter that covers the entire screen while the self-destruct timer is active doesn't help matters either. It's honestly kind of eye straining and causes all of the sprites and hazards to blend into the background.

Wow, the screenshots of the self-destruct sequence actually look even worse through my capture card.

Still, it’s really satisfying to finally make it to the exit in each level before destruction. Those victories feel earned and it’s exciting to see what the next level has to offer-

Damn it.

Okay so not only did I not get the Special Edition of Alien Breed, but I also got a copy that crashes every time I go to a new level. Such is the nature of floppy disk distributed games, sadly. None of them last forever, nor were many expected to last forever. Weirdly, this crash only happens once for each level. If I restart the Amiga and start the whole game over, when I next make it to that level it will load just fine. So, for a precaution, I should use level skip cheats to load every level in the game once before actually attempting to beat the game for real. So, to skip to level 4, we need to start up the computer in Level 2 and then type in… okay, are you serious Team 17?

You need to type in “AND THE GOOD LORD SAID LET THERE BE FLAPSHOTS”.

It works.

Yeah, one of the more infamous aspects of Alien Breed is the fact that all of the cheats are vulgar as hell. In case the terminology is new to you, flapshots is slang that refers to closeups of a woman's- okay, look, you didn’t come here to hear me talk about British pornography. I do try to keep this site’s content relatively PG and semi-professional, (in contrast to how filterless I am elsewhere,) and even if that wasn’t the case, I don’t think I’d be too comfortable publishing some of these cheats on my site given that one of them even includes a homophobic slur. With that said, I will share what I think is my favourite cheat in the game, as well as the only one that genuinely made me chuckle; “I EAT PITBULLS FOR FUCKING BREAKFAST MATE”, which gives player 1 seven lives. Beautiful. If you want to see the rest of the cheats, you can read them here on Lemon Amiga. Consider yourself warned and all. In case you were wondering, Team 17 co-founder Martin Brown (aka Spadge) is credited with coming up with the cheat codes, which in an interview from 2006 he describes as being a product of his naivety at the time. He’s no longer with us, sadly, having passed away in 2024, but based on his interviews as well as comments from those who worked with him, it doesn’t seem like he was the bigoted type as much as he just had an edgy Newgrounds-style sense of humour when he was younger that he ended up growing out of. Can’t confirm this sadly, as I can’t exactly flick him an email anymore, but either way I’m not keen on potentially unjustly slandering a dead man.

Anyway, I did actually manage to beat the game without using any cheats. It sure wasn't easy, but it's not quite as impossible as other Amiga games I've attempted, such as Shadow of the Beast or Blood Money. Alien Breed is very short, only six levels long, and some of those levels are very short as well. A complete run of Alien Breed will be over in under half an hour, and the execution isn't especially demanding. You can take a decent amount of damage, you have multiple lives and you can get extra lives by picking up those uncharacteristically cute little smiley faces on the floor. Your lives are capped at only four, however, so any 1-UPs you collect when you already have four lives are wasted.

My main issue is just with how easy it is to make the game unwinnable. Especially from level 4 onwards, the game is so filled with inescapable traps that exploring these large labyrinthine levels just stops being fun, as wandering off the beaten path usually results in you stumbling through a one-way electric gate into a room you don't have enough keys to escape, or is completely impossible to escape if one of the fire doors is closed, even if you have keys. Your only option if this happens is to simply hit the escape key to go back to the title screen and start the entire game over again from level 1.

Alien Breed is a surprisingly strategic game, but you're not really able to start forming that strategy until after a ton of trial and error and bumbling into soft locks. The game does have an in-game map you can view at Intex terminals or from a portable map if you've bought one from the terminals, but it lacks the important details that you'd need to see to really be able to form an effective strategy, such as the one-way electric gates. By the time I was at level 5, I'll confess I ended up resorting to using more detailed maps of the levels available online, just because I had gotten so sick of reaching a new level and immediately getting stuck before I even had a chance to get my bearings, and once you do that, you start to realise just how little of the level you even need to explore in order to get to the boss and start the self-destruction sequence. Level 4 is over in a minute if you do the bare minimum. I wanted to explore these levels more because there's a ton of secrets and hidden items and I wanted to afford the more expensive weaponry, but by the time I get the shotgun it just doesn't feel worth the risk anymore, both because I already have a good weapon, and also because by that point the softlock traps are far more numerous.

Don't get the wrong idea and think that I had a miserable time with Alien Breed. There's a lot of really cool mechanics and systems in play here, but I definitely think that better balancing, less softlocks, more rewarding exploration and a bit more content would go a long way. The game could really benefit from more enemy variety for instance, as 99% of the time you’re exclusively fighting reskins of the same xenomorph sprite that behave identically, and the remaining 1% is facehuggers. There's a solid base here worth expanding on, and I'll definitely be interested to see if either Alien Breed Special Edition or one of the sequels can help this formula reach its full potential.

I just really hope the next Amiga game I play isn't also loaded with softlocks and unwinnable situations. Is this such a common phenomenon on Amiga? Because this is starting to become a pattern with how often this style of design shows up in my Amiga reviews.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 3rd January 2025