ALIENS INVADED OUR PLANET

I came into this one expecting a janky-but-charming indie co-op shooter and left with a much clearer picture of what 'mixed reviews' actually means in practice. Aliens Invaded Our Planet is a six-player co-op and PvP FPS set in a 1900s frontier town called Richalley, and the arcade-survival loop is simple enough: survive waves of alien attackers across up to 50 story days, with an endless mode sitting alongside the structured campaign. On paper that sounds like a decent couch-killer evening. In practice, the foundation has some cracks that are hard to ignore. The content list is actually more generous than you'd expect from a solo developer working this budget tier. There are 9 playable characters, 16 weapon types, 20 enemy varieties, and 10 boss types spread across the day progression, plus a day-night cycle layered over the town. Power-ups drop during combat and the game has leaderboard rankings for the arcade crowd. That's a real feature set. The problem is that almost none of it is introduced to you. Community posts from players straight-up unable to figure out the firing controls on day one tell the whole story. When basic input mapping isn't communicated in-game, you've got an onboarding failure that no amount of enemy variety can paper over. The controls settings screen apparently has a hitbox issue where you have to click off-center just to open it, and once inside, mouse sensitivity and Y-axis inversion are pretty much all you can touch. From a shooter fundamentals standpoint, this is where the impatient part of my brain starts tapping the desk. No granular keybind remapping, no in-game control prompt, and player reports of achievements bugging out on repeat playthroughs point to a game that shipped without enough QA cycles. The netcode and matchmaking for the online co-op modes are not well-documented anywhere, which is a red flag when co-op is supposed to be the headline feature. I can't tell you the lobby experience is smooth because there's almost no community evidence either way. What I can tell you is that the Steam review split sits at roughly 62 percent positive across a small sample, which is faint praise for a game where the fun is supposed to scale with the number of people you bring to it. Who does this actually work for? Honestly, groups with very low friction thresholds and genuine willingness to troubleshoot together before the first alien shows up. If you and five friends already have a voice chat going, don't mind reading a community thread to figure out your keybinds, and you're approaching this the same way you'd approach a $1 arcade token drop, there's a functional wave-survival FPS underneath the rough surface. Solo players should look elsewhere immediately. The single-player mode exists but an arcade wave game with no social component and broken achievement tracking has nothing to hold you. For the performance-minded: system requirements are light enough that even older rigs won't sweat it, so at least frame-rate anxiety isn't on the list of problems. But that's a floor, not a selling point. Fred, Scout Team