Alienzix

I went in rooting for this one. A mouse-controlled 2D shooter built in GameMaker, clearly assembled by a solo or near-solo team, wearing its late-Windows-2000 nostalgia openly on its sleeve. That kind of scrappy sincerity is exactly what I like to champion. What I found instead was a game that earns its obscurity through genuine design problems rather than through lack of discovery. The structure is straightforward: work through 26 levels spread across 6 sections, shooting everything that shoots back at you. Bonuses fall from the top of the screen and your ship collects them on contact, granting weapons, lives, and shield. Pick up the same weapon twice and it evolves into a stronger variant, which is genuinely the most interesting mechanical idea on offer. The Hyper-Gravitation ability lets you capture incoming enemy fire and redirect it downward, but it runs on its own limited energy pool, so you cannot lean on it as a panic button. On paper, that is a functional arcade shooter loop. In practice, the weapon drop system undermines itself almost immediately. Bonuses rain down so constantly that you cycle through three or four weapons in the span of a few seconds, making any intentional loadout choice nearly impossible. The enemy variety doesn't help: early stages put you against static ground bases that simply get larger as sections progress. Flying enemies eventually appear and follow the same scaling logic. The game's lone late-stage twist, a run of scrolling levels where weapon drops stop appearing entirely, tips the difficulty into something punishing rather than satisfying. If you die in that stretch without a strong weapon already equipped, the default gun is close to useless against the health pools waiting for you. The whole experience clocks in at well under an hour even with a few retries, which would be forgivable if the half-hour felt tight and purposeful. It doesn't. Local co-op for two players at one machine is present, and the asymmetric balance is at least thought through: the second player takes less damage but moves more slowly, and shared energy is reduced so the mode doesn't trivialize things. That's a small but real design touch. The Japanese-accented weapon voice samples, naming weapons like "Leisaa" and "Homingu," suggest the developer was reaching for a certain doujin-shmup atmosphere. The reach doesn't quite match the execution, but the intention is legible, and I find that kind of earnest genre-love more interesting than cynical asset flips. For the PC version specifically, where the game was built to be played with a mouse, the controls are at least operating in their intended environment. That gives it a marginal advantage over its console port, where the input mismatch made everything worse. Even so, the honest answer is that there are dozens of freeware shmups with more mechanical depth, more interesting enemy patterns, and a better sense of moment-to-moment pacing. Alienzix is a time capsule of sorts, and occasionally a charming one, but the capsule doesn't contain much worth the excavation.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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