Review: Creatures - The First Blood - Plus Giveaway
by Staff Writer
August 31, 2010
Overview
Alien monsters have run amuck, and you need to fight them off for as long as you can in Creatures - The First Blood. You're going to be blowing them to bits in two different areas in this 3D dual stick shooter. Get ready to lock, load, and blast away enemies over and over again.
Features
The game alternates in level style from running around blasting enemies to standing behind a wall shooting at enemies. There isn't much depth to the levels, as level one and two are the same style as three and four, five and six, etc just with higher kill thresholds. OpenFeint is included for online high scores to compare your best effort on the endless game.
The Good
If you like endless style dual stick shooters like Minigore, then you'll enjoy Creatures. It's not as deluxe as Minigore which has been updated multiple times, but is fun in its own right. In the first level you run around blasting as much as you can to kill a certain number of monsters until the portal opens, and it's on to the next level.
The next level is a corridor, and the aliens are trying to push back the guard rail which pushes you into a spiked wall. This is a level where you need to last for a certain amount of time rather than a particle number of kills. Each new level introduces new types of enemies, and more kills or longer time to handle.
Along the way there are multiple weapons to add to your arsenal in an attempt to survive. The automatic weapons are essential, and so are the ray gun and health packs as the aliens do a lot of damage in a little bit of time. The game is action packed to say the least, but luckily it's broke up a little with the alternating challenge of the two types of levels.
It's nice to have concrete goal for level ends, but still play in an endless style. The game looks great with nice 3D modeling of the alien creatures. The animations are really well done with a slight vibration of the screen when killing enemies, and each enemy exploding into blood, and meat chunks when killed.
The Bad
The game is rather simplistic in that there are only two types of level where you’re either surviving or defending. Every level just alternates between the two styles in an endless manor. It becomes very repetitive quickly, and most of the good aspects are thrown out the window after a couple plays.
From time to time the controls stop working so the game doesn't recognize the movement stick which leads to death quickly. You can pause the game which temporarily fixes it, but at the start of the next level the controls stop responding. The game can stutter a bit on screen when the action gets rather intense.
The Verdict
Creatures - The First Blood is a well made new addition to the dual stick shooter genre. It's hectic throughout, but offers nice level goals across an endless high score style. The two alternating levels become repetitive quickly though, and the game doesn't have a long term outlook.
For only $0.99 Creatures is worth considering, but there are better dual stick shooters out there. One thing I thought of while playing the game was Starship Troopers, and the classic quote, "We've Got Bugs!"
*Note the video screencast below shows the action, but the game runs at a much faster pace.
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