Alien Hominid

Alien Hominid HD is a dressed-up port of the unforgivingly hard cult favorite flash game, which also made its rounds on last generation consoles. It features a quirky art style, and great sense of humor that’ll keep you coming back for more.

The game, made famous by Newgrounds is a throwback to the side scrolling shooters that many of us grew up with. There’s really not too much there for depth, but it eventually all equates to simple, stupid fun.

In Alien Hominid, you play as an alien who crash landed on earth, and had your spaceship taken from you…and thats basically it for the plot. Or, as the how to play menu puts it:

They’ve got your spaceship and you’ll blow up anything in your path to get it back.

The controls in the game are fairly simple yet offer a good bit of depth. You have your standard platforming controls, in addition to some rather creative attacks including, one of my favorites: the head bite.

Perhaps the greatest thing about this game is its refreshing sense of humor. It’s not exactly found in the story, but in the art and enemy design. One of the classic examples occurs during the boss fights where the enemy robot has a sign on it saying “Warning do not damage head.” From biting enemies heads off to all the tongue in cheek humor found throughout, this game just provides a level of quirkiness not found in most games these days.

Add to that the art style, which is all hand drawn. Quite frankly, the game looks really good, especially on an HDTV. It’s not jaw droppingly beautiful, but just really different from many of the other arcade titles out there.

But, the one part of Alien Hominid that falls short is the difficulty level. It would have done great business for arcades back in the day, because you will constantly find yourself pressing continue after losing all of your lives in an instant. This is mainly due to the one hit deaths and tough boss patterns.

Additionally, there’s not really too much to the game. It has a fairly short campaign mode, and a few mini games thrown in as well. There are two online game modes, but they don’t really have too much substance to them.

One of the biggest dissapointments in Alien Hominid has got to be the lack of online cooperative play. It is something that should be standard in a mindless beat em up like this, but instead all we get is local 4-player co-op.

Alien Hominid would make a great addition to your virtual library, provided you’re willing to get past the extreme level of difficulty. It has a great presentation, and hilarious sense of humor. The platforming, arcadey game style will appeal to many older gamers out there looking for something new and refreshing on the cheap.