Alien Blitz

I have a soft spot for the kind of solo-dev game that just does the thing it says on the tin and nothing more. Alien Blitz is exactly that: a 3D top-down shooter made entirely by one developer, Jean-Baptiste Simillon, that puts you in a mecha suit on an alien-invaded island and asks you to survive wave after wave of extraterrestrial monsters across a campaign that stretches across 37 maps plus 4 hidden secret stages. That is more content than most sub-dollar games dare to offer, and the sheer quantity of it earns at least a curious glance. The moment-to-moment play sits comfortably in the bullet-hell end of the top-down shooter pool. You start with a shotgun and unlock additional weapons as you push through the campaign, with an experience and upgrade system layering on top of the raw shooting. The bouncing laser is in there, and community notes suggest it only becomes genuinely useful once ranked up considerably, which is the kind of mechanical wrinkle that implies someone thought about progression rather than just dumping guns in a folder. Three standard difficulty settings plus a new-game-plus nightmare mode means the campaign has real replayability headroom for players who want to push harder. Monster infighting is present too, which adds a small tactical dimension when you are outnumbered and can lure enemy types into each other's fire. Where does it fall short? Honestly, most places you would expect a one-person 3D shooter from 2016 to fall short. The visuals are functional rather than atmospheric. The soundscape is not the kind of thing I would describe as intentional or evocative, which matters when I am reviewing something in the indie space. There are early community reports of launch-window stability issues, and a Steam update in 2024 dropped 32-bit support, so anyone running older hardware should check compatibility before hitting the button. The level editor and Steam Workshop support are genuinely welcome additions, but the Workshop community never grew large enough to become a meaningful content library. You are essentially playing the developer's 41 maps and then you are done. Who should look at this? Players who miss the lean, arcade-coded energy of old-school shooters like the original Alien Shooter series, or anyone who wants something that runs on modest hardware and gets out of the way fast. It is not a game that lingers with you or says anything particularly new. But it knows what it is, it delivers on that brief, and the level editor is a legitimate bonus for anyone who wants to make their own maps or share them. At its price tier, the ask is low enough that rough edges feel like character rather than failure.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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