Still, despite a solid offline mode, online play and multiplayer carnage is clearly where Alien Front Online was meant to shine. Players can engage in up to eight-player battles (four against four) over the Dreamcast modem, and the results are surprisingly good! Online stability is good, with lag-outs relatively rare phenomena, and overall the game does a good job of prediction, so enemies rarely start teleporting all over the screen. Furthermore, the chat feature, using the microphone, works pretty well. Although there is frequently some sound skipping during transmission, most messages come across loud and clear. Players have the option of sending messages to their team or to everyone in the game, allowing (at least in theory) for teams to coordinate some strategy. Unfortunately, in practice, conversation mostly seems limited to Junior-High-level taunts and dismally uninspired movie lines, offset slightly by the occasional "good game" comment some na�ve "good sport" throws into the mix.
The game's textures are of a very high quality. Look at the temple walls, for example. |
Online play is definitely a selling point for Alien Front Online, and once the player gets into a game, it proves its mettle. However, getting into a game has a few major hang-ups (so to speak). To begin with, Sega has once again neglected broadband users. Anyone who shelled out $60 for his broadband adapter is probably feeling more than a little cheated at this point, and with good reason. Aside from a meager couple of online shooters, support for the broadband adapter has been missing in action completely from Sega's roster of otherwise excellent online games. Alien Front Online plays perfectly well on a 56k modem, but anyone who connects over a DSL or cable modem is unlikely to feel inclined to dish out another monthly fee for a dial-up account.
Once players do get online, they are presented with a list of games, seemingly with no particular logic to their arrangement. Unfortunately, there is no way to sort the games in order to find an open game, a particular type of game, etc. Since Alien Front Online doesn't support the Dreamcast keyboard, there are no pre-game chat rooms, and finding a game is really just a matter of blindly plunging into a game that has already started.
Players have to choose which team they want to represent (Army or Alien) while they are still in the server lobby, which creates another interesting problem. A game can show up as "5/8" (meaning five people are playing and a total of eight are allowed in the game). However if four of those five people are all playing aliens and the player joining is an alien, the game comes back as full. Players don't have any indication that "their side" is full until they actually select the game and look. Once they do look, their only option is to leave the game, switch sides and rejoin. The whole process is relatively quick, but it seems unnecessarily cumbersome.
That cop car is most definitely in the wrong place. |
The strange fact of choosing a team before joining a game also leads to another unfortunate situation: horribly unbalanced games. If four people want to play aliens and one poor army sap joins the game, there is no mechanism in place to balance the teams. The lone human gets three dumb bots to "help" him against four aggressive human players. Even the most talented player in the world would buckle under those odds, and it adds an unfortunate balance issue to the well-crafted multiplayer experience.
A final complaint about the online experience is that in the (relatively rare) instance of a lag out, the player is not booted back to the server lobby, but is instead forced to reconnect to the Internet in order to rejoin his game.
The game wears its arcade heritage proudly, but maybe a little too blatantly. All the things that make an arcade game fun in the arcade (a quick thrill, fast gameplay, etc.) tend to work against the game in the home market. There are not a lot of nuances to Alien Front Online, and there are very few environments (although, as previously mentioned, the environments that do exist are excellent). Even online, it can get pretty tedious to bounce back and forth within a handful of different stages (which are selected by the computer randomly, apparently, so that players may even find themselves repeating a level after completing it). Some of the offline features, like Tactics Mode, may help extend the life of the game a little, but ultimately players are left with a relatively shallow arcade game, unfortunately.
Lastly, it's worth noting that, despite its focus on multiplayer, Alien Front Online has no split-screen mode! Whether for reasons of time, complexity of the environments, or simple neglect, the failure to include some sort of split-screen option definitely hurts a game as tailored to the multiplayer experience as AFO.
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