To be honest, I had never heard of Alpha Prime until I was asked to review it. As it turns out, I had recently built a new gaming PC and was looking forward to trying a lesser-known title and, well, this seemed to fit the bill. Knowing nothing about the game I didn't have any expectations, but I guess that meant I shouldn't have expected anything good.

My first impression of the game was that it seemed like it was going to offer some decent exposition delivered in a serious tone. A few moments later it is revealed that it is nothing more than the ramblings of a drunken man. So much for first impressions. My early disappointment with the writing not being taken seriously should have been a clue as to what was in store for me. What had initially started out with so much promise ended up being a boring and tedious journey into the center of the asteroid mining camp Alpha Prime.

Alpha Prime was once full of prospectors looking to make it rich gathering hubbardium, a mineral that the more spiritually inclined believe is the blood from the heart of a creature named Glomar. For as cheesy as this may sound it's actually handled decently enough, and the game's storytelling isn't half bad. Unfortunately, things go a bit downhill when going beyond the text and into the voice acting and narrative. Needless to say it's obvious that Black Element Software didn't have the budget to hire competent voice actors, yet for some reason went ahead and spent lots of time taking control away from the player in order to showcase them anyways. To top this off, most save points in the game are just before long cut scenes, resulting in a steady drain of interest and desire to continue on.

One of the main points of the tale is that prolonged exposure hubbardium makes humans go a bit crazy. The substance has the ability to slow down time (a feature titled "bullet time" in the control menu) and is highly addictive. Only a small percentage of people can handle exposure to it without becoming addicted, and the main character just happens to be one of them. After arriving on Alpha Prime our hero announces that he doesn't have enough strait jackets for all these "hubbardium nutters." When I heard this I was looking forward to something similar to Bioshock's sub-aquatic residents, but low-and-behold the "nutters" are hardly such. While expecting crazy prospectors running around screaming with drool and foam flying from their mouths, all I got was normal looking space people who I didn't even realize were dangerous until they started to fire on me. Don't worry; the game quickly does away with them in favor of crazy worker robots. After you've killed many robots—which come in only two varieties: yellow and red—the space marines (AKA Special Forces) come to the asteroid to hunt for leftovers and to move the story into its final phase.

At points I had flashbacks to Metal Gear Solid and its long and somewhat tedious cutscenes. Alpha Prime has everything a decent plot should, but the developers never seemed to realize that the main point of a game is to play it, not watch. Taking cues from other games developed since the late ‘90s wouldn't have only helped the narrative in the game, it would have probably helped just about every other aspect as well. Unfortunately, most of the game is nothing new in terms of combat or interaction. Sure the game tosses in some nice ideas, a decent AI, and a new physics engine, but the whole package is hardly enough to warrant a purchase.

The weapons are all pretty standard with the possible exception of the flamethrower, but it’s nearly useless anyways. In the beginning our hero is armed with nothing more than a safety hatchet, then picks up a pistol, then a shotgun, then a sub-machine gun and so on. The designs of the weapons are fairly bland as well: most look like plastic toys that might shoot foam balls rather than bullets. The bread-and-butter weapon of the game is the sub-machine gun, which has a good balance of distance and accuracy. Some of the other weapons, like the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher, are frequently ignored because there's so little ammo for them. Most combat situations are easy to assess on the fly because the player will either use the SMG or the shotgun, attempt to snipe at long range, or use the RECON hacking device. The RECON is really the only one that strikes out to offer something original.

The website for Alpha Prime reads: "However, if you cannot shoot, then there is your RECON, hacking device enabling you to remotely control various devices you meet on your way through the dark halls and corridors of Alpha Prime." While this may seem like the game allows for multiple combat options, really all this means is that if you're getting your ass kicked a lot you probably missed something that you were supposed to hack into. Many times hacking results in nothing more than a view of how many people you're going to have to kill. Most hacking points are just cameras, a few have a sentry machine gun, and the even fewer have mobile landmines. Hacking is less a substitute for killing enemies up close that it is the only way to actually survive certain encounters. Once in a while there will be so many enemies in a room that it seems impossible to kill all of them. After coming up against that kind of situation a few times I realized that I was expected to hack into something that would allow me to remotely deal with the ambushers. While hardly a Deus Ex find-your-own-way-to-pass-the-encounter style that it tries to encourage, the RECON still changes combat up enough so that it’s a welcome addition to the game.

Hacking into the camera security systems also gives the player an oft-needed situational advantage over the AI. This is necessary because as few as two enemies can be a difficult hurdle to overcome, with many of the special forces having the same weapons and amount of health as the player, despite the odds being stacked 10 to 1 against them. The AI will occasionally throw out a curve ball where a robot will rush forwards to get a shot at point-blank range, but mostly they just use effective duck and cover tactics. When having the situational-upper-hand and enough firepower still isn't enough to survive, the player can also use hubbardium to get a leg-up on the AI. I only used it a few times in the game's bullet time, which was the decisive factor that got me though plenty of tricky situations that called for quicker kills with better accuracy. These situations are not the norm though; most of the level design is so simple and straightforward that it feels more akin to a shooting gallery than a dynamic duel.

With elements lifted from just about every major first-person shooter to come out in the last 5 years you'd think that a game covering all its bases would end up being something more than just average. Alpha Prime stocks creepy corridors with flickering lights, enemies that pop out of seemingly safe corners, rail cart rides, block puzzles, and even physics puzzles in low gravity. Knowing what works and then making it work are apparently two completely separate things. The level design and exceptionally repetitive encounters are tedious after very early sections of the game. Only a few areas in the end away from the mold of long corridor sprinkled with handfuls of enemies - the early hours of the game are just painful and repetitive. If had not been playing to review it, I would have given up from frustration and tedium long before the game breaks away and becomes a little more interesting. Pulling all these successful elements from other titles actually ends up just leaving the game feeling derivative, like I've played better versions of it before.