Reviews// Alien Hominid

Alien Hominid had started life as a piece of web-design frippery on Newsgrounds.com; as a whimsical and colourful cartoon shooter borne out of a love of such games as Metal Slug, Gunstar Heroes and Contra, and unleashed upon an audience bred to fritter time playing precisely these sort of games. Recognizing that it was taking on a cultish air and, perhaps inspired by the successes of Clover Studio's Viewtiful Joe, who's now three games deep and with his own TV show, The Behemoth beat itself into a formal structure and prepared to get the yellow-alien-dog-assassin-action-hero onto proper consoles, so that proper people might be able to have a go. And so here it is. From a hand-drawn downloadable .swf to a GC-Rom/PS2 DVD in a matter of months

Of course, not anyone could produce something so worthy in the context of such a simple, humble game. But The Behemoth is no ordinary outfit, describing itself as “...a small group of veteran developers who self-fund their work and take orders from no one! [And] oversee every aspect of production from start to finish...” They clearly have more than their professional pride at stake, and that makes their confidence all the more significant.

Its approach is subversive and almost anti-establishment; in fact, it's the industry's equivalent of the A-Team - with Alien Hominid epitomising that comparison. Like Hannibal Smith, its overwhelmingly simple approach is what makes it seem clever; like 'Face', the Dan Palladin artwork is uniquely handsome; like Murdock, the premise is amusing and slightly unhinged; and like BA Baracus, it, erm, won't drink milk or get in no helicopter (although there is some UFO piloting to be done). But under competitive pressure from the established big boys, The Behemoth has taken this little idea of a Flash game back into the barn, hit it about with a spanner a bit and welded pieces of wood all over it. And now it's crashed back out, as highly polished and sophisticated as the concept could allow, even though it's little more than the assembled parts of some other old things.