return of Alien Shooter

It's been over a year since I first played Sigma Team's Alien Shooter, an excellent arcade shooter that blurred the lines between shoot 'em up, FPS hallway crawlers and isometric clickfest RPGs.

Sigma Team has since released an informal sequel of sorts, Theseus: Return of the Hero. In it you play Theseus, a lone warrior that crash lands onto the surface of Earth only to find that it has been overrun by the same aliens seen in Alien Shooter. What I want to know is, just where is he returning from? Is this indeed the Greek hero of old? The question just begged to be asked.

Immediately noticeable are the game environments. No longer are you limited to the gray corridors of a research facility teeming with nasty aliens; you are instead transported to a Western-styled post-apocolyptic wasteland, complete with dual six-guns and a suitably twangy soundtrack.

Though I knew something was funny when I saw "Powered by Alien Shooter" on the title screen. Apart from the different objectives and open yet strangely corridor-driven outdoor areas, this seems like a repackaging of Alien Shooter. The monsters are the same, and what's worse, there are less weapons available! Was the intent of Theseus to develop the storyline in the Alien Shooter universe from another perspective? Had the alien creatures escaped from the research lab, despite my best efforts to trap them inside the structure with thousands of packets of dynamite? Why am I asking these questions about a simple arcade shooter? It doesn't matter; I want Alien Shooter 2.