Alien Hallway

Developer: Sigma Team Inc
Steam Release: Aug 2011
Hours Played: 6.5
Simlar To: Death by Game Show / Swords and Soldiers
Rating: 2/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY
Alien Hallway is not your typical tower defense game for as the name suggests the battlefield is a hallway and your "towers" are troops that spawn on the left and which slowly move towards the enemy's base on the right in an effort to destroy it. While doing so, they mow down aliens who travel from right to left who are likewise determined to destroy your own turret which acts as your base. A kind of Swords & Soldiers with aliens if you will. Engineer type droids collect the energy needed to buy your units which you do so by clicking one of the seven icons along the bottom. Units are on cool-down; green means they’re available, purple - they're not. You get a fireball ability which is also on a cool-down and which you use by clicking the icon in the top left and then where you want to detonate it. My first impression of the game was not favourable. 
 

BALANCE & PACE
For a start, I didn't like the way your troops and the aliens bunched together when they converged and I found it difficult to find the pointer amongst all the mayhem when trying to click on the various units' special ability. It all seemed a bit tacky and cheap - but, hey, that ragdoll effect on the enemy deaths was good. Another additional weakness is that the hallway is pretty much the same design for all three planets only in a slightly different skin. However, after realising you need to grind early levels to earn gold to upgrade, I started to appreciate what was required and grew determined to beat all levels with five gold stars for each. I also appreciated when to make engineer droids and when not to and that a strategy was needed to send certain units into the fray at a certain time. The decision when to upgrade particular units was also not to be taken lightly. 
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
Let's face it, Alien Hallway doesn't have the biggest budget in the world. It insists on installing the XNF framework redistributable everytime on launch and it makes more spelling mistakes and grammatical errors than a struggling five year old. Still, what can be said for it is that it does allow you to tinker with the difficulty. Settings allow you to do minor tweaks but most significantly allows you to choose one of four difficulty settings. Therefore, once you've played through the game on medium you can crank it up to hard to give yourself more of a challenge  later. Unfortunately, if you choose to change from windowed view to full screen you have to restart for the changes to take effect. Always a bit of a pain.

 

PROGRESS SYSTEM
You'll be perusing the menus and reviewing progress a fair amount when outside of the main game. Your campaign takes place on just three planets with seven levels, each of which are listed and which you play through one by one. You may switch between planets by clicking the arrows in the right corner whereupon the game will zoom out and then in again on the chosen planet. Each mission awards you up to five stars and you can check this by clicking on the name of the mission. The other menus are all about upgrading troops and various perks and you access these screens after clicking Play when you have chosen a level. You will spend a lot of time at these menus considering what to upgrade and you will need to go back to old levels and replay them in order to earn gold to upgrade in order to beat the later, harder levels.

CONCLUSION
After reading a few negative reviews and being quite skeptical at first, I was pleasantly surpised by AH once I appreciated it for what it is. Each mission doesn't take long (around 3-5 minutes on average) and they are enjoyable in bite-sized chunks. On medium setting, I got overrun a few times on some of the early levels but once I understood what I needed to do and started to pin the foes back with upgraded units and better strategy, I started to enjoy this game. True, once you suss out how the game works (and which units to spam in which situation) it is not one of the most challenging in the world. However, this was on the medium setting. Oh, and hats off to the guy who came up with that ragdoll physics effect as well!