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Tom Ohle, along with Meridian4 and IDEA Games were nice enough to send over a Steam code to download their latest game, Alpha Prime. So I delved into this First Person Shooter and wrote up this review shortly after beating the game. So read on and find out if the game is worth you hard earned $20.

Sometimes you play a game and you have fun. Other times, you play a game that you want to have fun with, but it just serves you a plate of frustration at every turn. This would be the way that Alpha Prime treats you. It wants to be good and has some excellent story elements. But too many things seem to get in the way of the enjoyment.

Alpha Prime is a first person shooter with some puzzle elements. It puts you in the shoes of Arnold, a researcher who is resistant to a mined mineral called hubbardium. An old friend named Warren has called you from a desolate mining asteroid called Alpha Prime. He has gotten into some trouble and needs your help to get him out of Alpha Prime. Of course, there is a lady in the middle of this by the name of Livia. You never fully want to trust her as she seems to be playing everyone for a fool to get her hands on whatever is so important at Alpha Prime.

The game starts well; with a long opening movie sequence that is rendered with the proprietary engine created by IDEA Games is not too shabby. It seems to be a bit like a more colourful version of the Doom 3 engine, but not as shiny. It sets up a rather intricate plot and sets you up with the first of several important characters.

The game runs you through a neat little tutorial before you start to get deep into the action. The environments look nice, and the character models of the good guys and the bad guys look really good. There are a lot of great facial animations that convey a fair amount of emotion. The models also move with a sense of realism. Someone gets shot; they start to limp a bit. It is a nice visual mechanic. The levels are fairly different from one another, but the sections of each level are reused a fair amount. It always seems like you are going through the same section of the level again and again. Enemies were rather bland and repetitive. There are about a dozen total bad guys that I saw running around at any point in the game, so it seems like you are killing the same guys over and over.

While I really enjoyed the script, and the facial animations seem to sync up with the voices coming out of the mouths of the characters, the voice acting was decent at best, and dismal at worse. Some of the characters seem to be putting on a good performance, but most just seem to be phoning it in. No real emotion seems to come across from the main character, and there is a sense of dread anytime Livia was going to speak. Smaller shops are not going to get A-list talent, but you need to have people that can convey emotion when you have a good story. Some ambient music plays during the level and it built up a lot of suspense as it would put you on edge. It had the feeling of making you think something was about to jump out at the next turn. Weapon sounds were a mixed bag. While the weapons would sound good, there were sound cut outs at points when the weapons were fired in close proximity to another weapon. Overall, though, the weapons had a satisfying punch.

At this point, you have had a decent experience, but when you advance to the second level of the game, things go from fun to frustrating in a hurry. The culprit is difficulty. The difficulty levels in this game do not match what you select. Every level should be changed from Easy, Medium, Hard, etc to Unforgiving, More Unforgiving and You Are Never Going to Finish This Game. Health seems to be far and few between leaving you always on the verge of death. Also there are sections of the game where you have to go to oxygen stations while fighting. This is the breaking point in the game. You are behind cover and you end up dying, because you did not get oxygen. Of course, you will die as soon as you leave cover, due to all the bad guys having