Alien Breed: Tower Assault

The third major installment in the Alien Breed saga (big word ;-P), the Tower Assault is a perfect example of how old games should have been evolving. What do I mean by evolution? It's really simple - all you have to do, is take every key aspect of the original game and improve it somehow. Here's how it's done:

The gameplay:
As far as scroll-shooters are concerned, it's not just a question of raising the number of levels. Alien Breed 2 had it, featuring 16 level, instead of AB1's 12, but this time Team17 went a couple of steps further, not only doubling the level number (36 main ones, plus additional "linking levels"), but also providing numerous ways of accomplishing them, making Tower Assault one of the first non-linear shooters. According to the box, there are 276 ways of beating the game. I doubt that anyone actually tried to follow every one of them, but it's good to know you can try and take new paths and explore new levels - the phenomena widely known as "replayability value".
Speaking about the levels, it's always good to have a wide variety of tasks, apart from a simple survival. No matter if it's just destroying some power cells, activating a terminal, or finding your way through the maze of hazardous containers, things like that make the game more challenging and entertaining.
Oh, and a new retreat mode was added, enabling you to shoot while backing off.

The graphics:
Tower Assault, much like Alien Breed 2, features indoor levels, as well as outdoor ones. This time, however, the indoor ones have been divided into 7 towers, each of them having its own distinctive atmosphere and graphic style. The civilian levels are mostly brownish with lots of furniture and bloody corpses. The security and military levels are full of hi-tech steel hardware and crawling with lethal droids. The science tower has a white, sterile look, while the engineering sector is rusty-metallic. There's also the spooky stores tower, where all of the lights are down, except for your trusty flashlight, and the floors are cramped with junk. The level design is just brilliant - miles ahead of the predecessors' empty coldness.
As you can see, the quality of graphics isn't everything. In the end, it's the atmosphere that matters most and this is accomplished by paying attention to necessary details and remaining true to the game's concept. This is why the Tower Assault's graphics seem much better than the original Alien Breed's, although upon closer inspection you would notice that, in fact, little has changed.

The background:
Back in the early nineties, if you wanted people to take your game seriously, you should have come up with some background story. Told either by a couple of paragraphs in the manual or by some simple cutscenes, the story always deepens the game's atmosphere, by enabling the most important thing - the player's imagination. Tower Assault features tons of story pockets revealed through the Intex Infobase or by PDA cards lying scattered all over the base. Believe it or not, these things, although cheezy as hell, actually did their job back in 1994. They even made a FMV intro for CD versions of the game (watch it here).

The rules mentioned above are not all that complicated, yet many great game series had to die prematurely, because their creators shamefully neglected them. Even today, many game designers think that all what it takes to make a great sequel is just to add some more levels. The truth is, everything changes: the times, the platforms, the gamers' expectations. Games need to evolve, or else they become extinct. Just play the damn Alien Breed series if you still don't know what I mean.