Alpha Mission II

"An all round average effort"

Alpha Mission II Review

Many classic titles have been released for the Neo Geo, and amongst all those excellent games some of the titles that were just good (not bad, just good) fell through the cracks. One of those games is Alpha Mission II (to be referred to from here on in as “AMII”), and amongst all the fantastic fighting games on the Neo it’s not hard to believe. AMII is a “shmup” (or shoot-em-up) in the horizontal scrolling space war vein that was released in 1991. While many fighting game fans turn out to also be shmup fans, fans of shmups from the 16 bit era and forward just don’t translate into a large enough fan base on the Neo to make this a popular game. Anyway, enough about why you may never have heard about AMII, lets review it!

Story:

Initially, I was going to copy the information from the back of the box for this section. But that isn’t really how you write a good game review. A summary of the game’s story reads like any other futuristic shmup: “The bad guys are coming! They have an army with superior weapons and numbers, and they’ve decimated our forces! We have a ship that can stop them, though. We just forgot that it was in the hanger until five minutes ago. You’re our race’s last hope….blah blah…go shoot stuff!!!!”

Now I’ll do the standard graphics, sound, control, and game play scores, and then I’ll comment on the game in a more general sense.

Graphics: 12.5/25

This game weighs in at 47 Megs (“47 Megs of awesome Power” according to the insert), and unfortunately it shows in the graphics. Like many earlier Neo games, AMII looks like a game that could be easily pulled off on the SNES…that is until you see some of the sprite scaling effects and take into account the amount of stuff happening on the screen (basically the only reason the SNES can’t do this game is because it doesn’t have enough RAM). The colours are all pretty dark and there is a low amount of variety in colours. Enemies also get recycled quite heavily, not to the point where it would really aggravate you…but you will notice that same enemy ship attacking you over and over. I also just don’t really like the look of the game. The enemy designs make it hard to tell what stuff is supposed to be, and the artistic style isn’t that appealing. All and all the graphics aren’t bad for 1991, but they definitely don’t stack up to the standard of even the earlier Neo games.

Sound: 12.5/25

Ugh. Sounds in this game are tinny, and have that 80’s synthesiser kind of sound to them that you would expect from a game several years older. Just not up to standard.

Control: 20/25

Spot on. The ship goes exactly where you tell it to go. You also don’t need to use rapid fire to lay enough fire on the screen to kill all the enemies. The game loses marks since the armor selection method is very hard to use. Basically, once you have an armor power up available to use you must press the C button to get into the armor menu and then select which armor you want by moving the cursor to it and hitting A. You have to do all that in real time while fighting the enemy. I know that shmups are supposed to be nerve-racking experiences, but this armor selection method just seems hateful. I really wish they had put the armor selection in the pause screen.

Game play: 12.5/25

The game has to take a hit on the score here. I’m scoring this section from the stance of being a pretty big shmup fan (my three favourite genres are easily fighting games, RPGs and shmups), but not the world’s most hardcore shmup fan. In this game you are able to shoot at both airborne and ground based enemies at the same time, which is a 2D shmup design idea that has seemed to go completely out of style. It adds the amount of things you have to manage, but I don’t think it really adds or subtracts much difficulty from the game. AMII has some frenetic action, as well as some strategy to it that can make battles really satisfying (you always need to identify and destroy any fixed turrets as soon as possible, for example), but the game also feels cheap a lot of the time. Most of the feelings of cheapness come from how the game is designed to play. The ship always seems to be moving too slowly, making you take cheap hits. That armor selection method also rears its ugly head here. It is hard to try and fight enemies while navigating a menu to activate your powerups (which you have to collect three different parts to actually use). You also get shot at by enemies after you can’t hit them anymore (you can’t really shoot stuff on the bottom 5% of the screen), which can make you go crazy. There is also a distinct lack of payoff after boss battles. Its hard to explain what I mean here, other than to say that the great feeling you get from beating a boss in a shump just isn’t there in AMII (I think the disappointment mainly comes from a lack of explosions). When it comes to game play, I’ve certainly played worse than AMII, but I’ve also played much better.

General/Overall:

There are better shmups out there across different platforms, and there are worse ones. On one hand, you could be playing something truly terrible, but on the other you could be playing something really good like Ikaruga or Salamander. Basically, its up to you to decide if this game is for you or not. One thing to consider is that there are not only better shmups out there, but there are also better Neo Geo games begging for you attention/money.

The final word: Alpha Mission II is good, but you can do a lot better.

Score (out of 100): 61.5

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/03/04