Shadowgrounds: another alien shooter

To appreciate Shadowgrounds, you have to ignore the story . Like any other arcade-styled shooter (or your typical run and gun FPS for that matter), the story should be of no consequence next to the action. To its detriment, Shadowgrounds tries to emphasize the story. And like Doom 3, a game that has influenced it in many ways, it has fallen victim to that mistake.

You begin the game as a lowly mechanic on the newly terraformed Ganymede. But one day something goes wrong, and the base is overtaken by aliens bent on wholesale destruction. Who knows how they got there? You have to find a gun and start shooting them, and hopefully find out what caused this attack through various missions you receive while blasting your way through the terraformer colony.

Once the bullets started flying I got the feeling I was playing another game: Alien Shooter, which I still play regularly. Evaluated next to each other, the technological differences are obvious: the smoothly animated 3D engine and crisp textures of Shadowgrounds make Alien Shooter look about five years older than it actually is. The controls in Shadowgrounds also behave like you would expect: the three-dimensional world moves around your character's feet. Alien Shooter puts you inside a static map where your character rotates around the torso, making running for your life and shooting behind you more comedic than anything else.

But where Shadowgrounds tries to deviate from what would have been a superior action game is in its presentation. Shadowgrounds spends too much time setting things up. There are computers and PDAs strewn about the colony with snippets of backstory or "last entries" of the residents. And the quiet glass hallways that are suddenly breached by machine-gun toting aliens trick only works the first time. When the action can be observed from afar, it's impossible to be scared because you see things coming. It's not like being behind the ironsight of a gun while walking slowly down a darkened hallway. Though Shadowgrounds never seems to understand this concept. It is constantly feeding you information and manufacturing "scares" to no avail, which only serve to slow down the pace of the action. At its best, Shadowgrounds allows you to shoot aliens. Repeatedly and often without aiming. But this basic principle was strangely lost amidst the game's movie-like staging.

The game should really be focusing on the attack itself and the number of enemies on screen. The colony is being invaded and you seem to be the only guy that can do anything about it, despite being assisted occasionally by AI controlled characters. It's about that feeling of being overwhelmed, watching the bullet count slowly deplete as the aliens close in. But it seems like every time one of those situations arrives, it's over.

Alien Shooter is the cold, unfeeling machine - it sends hordes upon hordes of aliens your way and it's up to you to make it out alive. The game doesn't provide an easy way out - you have to use your weapons wisely, and learn to backtrack into easily manipulatable areas. Shadowgrounds is about facing enemies in short, controlled bursts, complete with medkits nearby after each encounter. There aren't so many hallways as there are enclosed areas with lots of doors - obstacles that are great for funneling enemies into your range of fire. The pacing of Shadowgrounds is more like a typical shooter in that it allows you to plan ahead, and to think about your surroundings. There is no sense of impending danger.

An average alien encounter in Shadowgrounds. They look amazing, though.

This is only the beginning of one of the harder levels in the game. By the end, the floors are completely covered in the blood of the fallen. And yes, you do run out of ammo.

The flashlight seems like such an innocent addition at first, in the wake of Doom 3's most popular modification. Using a flashlight while you shoot at things in the dark is just practical design, right? But in Shadowgrounds, it served another purpose. I knew the game's atmosphere had succeeded at the point where I found myself shooting at shadows playing across the metallic walls. There were some plants in the room I was in, and my flashlight against their leaves imitated the spidery limbs of the alien creatures I had been fighting moments earlier. I wasn't scared - but I was completely enthralled by what had just taken place.

The radar is clearly influenced by Aliens, and it shows the location of your objectives and any incoming enemies. The times where I was running down what seemed to be an empty corridor, accompanied only by the "beeping" reminiscent of the climax to Cameron's influential sci-fi film definitely added to the game's atmosphere, but once again these occasions were short lived.

Upgradable weapons try to give the game depth. There are a total of ten weapons, each with three upgrade options that can be applied in any order. The upgrades are purchased with "spare parts", a kind of currency that can be found on the corpses of fallen aliens. But they are plentiful, so there's no real need to save them; I upgraded all the weapons available in the demo within the first two missions.

Though what I find the most intriguing about this game is the level editor, which is about two months late in arriving according to the official forums. For a game of this type, the level editor would add much needed replayability. Perhaps the fan community could come up more harrowing missions. Also only half-implemented is the co-operative multiplayer - while playing at the same PC provides some suitable old school arcade buttonmashing, networked play would have been appreciated.

Technically, there is nothing wrong with Shadowgrounds. Being used to the viewpoint Alien Shooter affords, I would have liked a more flexible camera system. The not-quite-top-down view felt a little uncomfortable, as if I was constantly having to peer over some nonexistent obstacle. The visuals are presented in more colours than red, brown and gunmetal grey - always a good thing when trying to avoid the comparisons with id's lineage of first person shooters. And yet Shadowgrounds is another example of a game not leveraging its strengths. I don't want to sit through cutscenes to learn about my objectives. There was really no tension in the game to speak of. The parts where you do get to shoot aliens are spread too far apart. It's almost as if Frozen Byte didn't want you to overlook their amazing engine, and left ample time for the player to take it all in. And that's fine if this was some kind of roleplaying game where that sort of stuff is important. But it's not. Instead, I was stuck playing an arcade shooter that didn't want to be an arcade shooter. And there's nothing more frustrating to play than a game that unnecessarily complicates such a simple objective: shoot the aliens.