Earthlings are invading and it’s time to send them back from whence they came.
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At first glance we thought Attack of the Earthlings was like a reverse Xcom, where you play the aliens instead of the humans, fighting for freedom in the face of a technically superior invasion force, and while it is exactly that in many respects and has a lot in common with the Firaxis series, the two are actually quite different from one another.
While Xcom has a deep and involving strategy layer where humans fight aliens on Earth, in AotE the shoe is on the other foot and the player takes control an alien happily minding its own business when along comes a giant drill-shaped spaceship full of corporate British dickheads. As for strategy, there’s none of that here beyond a short four-way skill tree to unlock a handful of new abilities as the game progresses.
In each of the game’s missions, you start with a matriarch who can spawn other aliens. The creature you initially spawn is always the same, unremarkable grunt, but if you’ve got enough biomass, the resource needed to make upgrades, then you can mutate that grunt into a more powerful creature. Then, with your alien queen and her minions in tow, you advance through various workplace environments, taking out guards and anyone else you encounter for that matter.
As far as gameplay goes, while turn-based and borrowing many of the mechanics found in Xcom, AotE is much more linear and authored than all but a handful of the more narrative-driven Xcom 2 missions. The levels are custom built, the guard and civilian locations pre-defined, and there’s not a huge amount of choice when it comes to how you navigate each level. There is tactical action, however, and this comes from how you advance through the grid-based environments, although not so much which direction you take.
While it pays to be subtle, this isn’t a stealth game in the sense that your ultimate goal is to move through a level as if you were never there, rather you’ve got to remain undetected until the moment you strike and kill your enemies with brutal efficiency. The thing is, you need to kill your opponents in Attack of the Earthlings; death is the fuel that keeps you moving forward.
Each corpse, whether it be alien or human, is food to be consumed that can, in turn, be used to spawn new units and then upgrade them, creating a constant cycle where you turn fleshy humans into alien beasties, as well as recycling your own fallen units as and when you can. The queen is at the heart of things, and if she dies it’s game over. You can lose your minions though, but obviously it’s better if you don’t, because if you can build up a small squad then you’ll have more options.
Those options will largely depend on how you evolve your units, and there are three ways you can do that. The Stalker is great at sneak attacks and is the cheapest of the tree. If you can spend a bit more you’ll get a ranged Disruptor, and a little more will get you a Goliath that can take a bit more damage. The more biomass you have left at the end of a level the more you get to spend on new abilities, so there’s every incentive to be careful and precise with your actions
There are guards of various strengths and abilities to deal with, and sometimes they’ve got better armour than your attack strength. You can synchronise your attacks to deal with situations like this, but you have to carefully coordinate your units to do so. Mixing up ranged attacks, flanking manoeuvers, and even setting traps by hiding in cupboards, you’re able to outsmart the guards who can usually kill one of your units as soon as they’re spotted. Similarly, you also have to take out any civilians you encounter, because they’re valuable meat for the grinder.
And so you progress through the largely linear levels, chomping on guards and spawning minions, tackling objectives as you go. There are secondary objectives to fulfill if you’ve got the opportunity and/or inclination, but a perfect run through a level is going to be hard to achieve, at least first time. The alternative, of course, is save scumming your way through tricky situations, something that Team Junkfish seems to encourage by giving you multiple autosaves. For the most part you can probably muddle through without resorting to this, although one level, the penultimate one, was pretty unforgiving and effectively locked you into a fail-state for the mission if you were sloppy with some of your early turns, and we didn’t enjoy it as a result.
What we did enjoy was the humour in the script, and the fun that the developers clearly had playing with genre tropes and writing tongue-in-cheek dick jokes. It’s silly stuff, and the sense of humour is very British; think The Office meets Alien and you’re in the right ballpark. As you ascend the giant spaceship-drill the floors become increasingly bureaucratic, so at the start you’re near the engines and taking down technicians, and by the end you’re eating Jenny from accounting.
For the most part, it’s wholesome turn-based fun, although sometimes the pacing is a bit too slow and your path a touch too linear. The secondary objectives offer a little friction, but really there’s not a huge incentive to tackle them unless you’re trying to squeeze every last second out of the experience. Attack of the Earthlings has a really strong concept, and the tactical side of the game was engaging for the most part. We loved the premise and the playful sense of humour found in the writing, which certainly dragged us through a couple of bottlenecks where we were beginning to lose interest.
When faced with the prospect of reverse Xcom, with aliens eating annoying middle managers, we were very intrigued. Lightweight strategy elements and a stronger emphasis on linear storytelling made for a very different experience to the one we were expecting, and while a touch more strategic depth wouldn’t have gone amiss, we still had fun feasting on the flesh of Nigel from marketing, and we think Xcom fans looking for something vaguely similar but tonally different might well enjoy this fun little game.
Keyword: Attack of the Earthlings