It’s still a top down shooter based in the eerily cold depths of mechanical structures, hissing with benevolence as it creates a saturated atmosphere of terror. Perhaps this is one of the best aspects retained from the originals; its amazing ability to instil fear with what little it has to work with.

Enemies come at you thick and fast whilst you don’t have nearly enough ammo at your disposal to deal with them. This aids greatly in upping the ante and serves to create some truly terrifying moments as you hear the dreaded click of a hammer slamming in an empty firing chamber. The twin-stick firing mechanics work very well and thus the gunplay is indeed very fun, the only problem is that this is pretty much the entire game.

Beyond shooting hordes of aliens and creeping through darkened tunnels, there’s not a whole lot else to see. Exploration is an aspect as you’ll constantly be foraging for ammo, but the largely linear level designs leave little area to actually look around. Most of the time you’ll just find yourself venturing back and forth between various control panels to open up the rest of the path, wiping out mobs of aliens along the way. This isn’t helped by the length of the campaign either. “Is it too short?” I hear you ask. No, this is one of the rare occasions in which you’ll find the game to be far too long! Initially the game is very fun to play, once you realise the actual length of the levels you’ll think “Wow, that was a huge level; that means I’ve got a lot more fun to have!” These were exactly my thoughts upon taking an hour to complete just the first level! However, the derivative play style serves to instil boredom more than fear after several hours. You’ll find yourself wanting the game to end much sooner than you should.

It’s not all bad though, the campaign is far from terrible and the gameplay does mix it up a bit as you progress into the later levels. You enter a few new areas and this provides for a more refreshing experience, sadly these are few and far between and don’t really serve to stave off the inevitable boredom that settles in far too often. However, the game is most certainly worth playing until the end and it never reaches a point where you’ll think “I’ve had enough.” On top of the healthy campaign offering, there is also the singleplayer survival mode which tasks you with surviving for as long as you can in various preset areas. There’s also a separate multiplayer campaign mode, but it merely offers a selection of random levels that aren’t linked into the campaign. This is a real shame as a co-operative offering of the full campaign would have been a very welcome edition, especially seeing as the lack of a co-operative campaign was one of the major gripes with the previous renditions of the title.

The graphics are, surprisingly, very good. Team 17 squeezed everything they can out of the Unreal Engine with what they had at hand to create some excellent lighting effects with overall satisfying textures. The sound effects are noteworthy too with a decent voice acting cast and satisfying weapon sound effects. With regards to the weapons, there is a plethora of firearms at your disposal throughout the game. These range from the assault rifle that has a nostalgic pulse rifle sound to it, the highly effective and enjoyable shotgun to the special weapon that fires what appears to be super heated balls of energy that destroys all aliens in its path. Various items can be used such as flash grenades and frag grenades, healthpacks and armour pickups can serve to aid you through out too. There is also an interesting upgrade mechanic where in you use credits collected through exploration to apply upgrades to weapons and items to make them more powerful/effective etc.

Overall, especially for the price of admission, Alien Breed 3: Descent is a good game. It drags out a bit, but you can’t complain an awful lot about having too much bang for your buck. The lack of a co-op campaign utilizing the singleplayer story is a bit disappointing too. However, at its core, Alien Breed is a fun top down shooter with great graphics, a lot of content and a lot of fun to be had.

Thanks to Team17 for supplying us with a review copy.

The games included within this time frame and therefore the statement include Dead Space 2, Need for Speed, Crysis 2 and several yet to be named titles. This could mean big money for EA but also mean you get that little bit more from your money.

Will all of the EA titles be suited to online play though? As we know, lots of games currently on the market only really work in their single player state with the online either dead or non-existent. Only time will tell…

Earl didn’t give any specific examples as to how this focus on action would change the gameplay, although he did say that his team is excited about the possibilities:

“The first one was well received, and we want to take advantage of that start with something that has tremendously wide appeal. We’re more focused on the action than the horror this time. We’re more empowering to the player. We’ve got a lot of feature innovation and we feel comfortable because we have something with resonance and we have something that’s so capable.”

At this point in time, I dont think I am entirely sure how I feel about the idea of Dead Space 2 shifting its primary focus from outright survival-horror to down right action. A desolate story of Necromorphs need sequences that keep you on the edge of your seat. Let’s just hope that the team at Visceral can find a good balance between the two extremes – mirroring the FEAR series, which was well known for the un-nerving moments, as well as it’s fast paced shoot-outs.

Only time will tell – that that time coming sometime before March 2011.

Dead Space 2 is set to feature a space station full of Necromorphs and a whole new array of weapons to kill them with. Crysis 2, which was well renound for being ridiculously hard to run on your PC, will also be coming to both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It will be Crytek’s first console game but if the success of the first Crysis is anything to go by, it should be a good one.

It’s over a year away, but it’s good to see 2 of the biggest games on the future market having some form of dating, not to mention that only ‘before’ March 2011 has been said, that could mean Christmas 2010…

EA senior recruiter Jeff Ballard, reports, “The previous installment in the Dead Space franchise received numerous awards … and the same core team is in place to create an even better follow up.” He then went on to say, “The game is in the later stages of pre-production, ready for production in the next few months, with many of the navigational and combat mechanics in place.”

Dead Space 2 is set to be released on Xbox 360 and PS3 sometime in 2010.