Sometimes you just want to play something retro. Indie games have been filling in this niche for years on Steam, so tonight I selected one I've had for ages but have not yet played.

'Alien Attack: In Space' is a top down shooter. It is not asteroids, even though it plays slightly like it.

At it's core, this is a simple top down arcade wave shooter. You are a ship. You can shoot enemy ships. Shoot enemy ships to get high scores and power ups. Keep doing this until you die or get bored. Repeat.

And... That's it! There's nothing more too it!

There are actually two games here, "In Space" and "Zero". They play mostly the same but have different weapon drops and 'rewards'.

"In Space" has various pallet swaps you can activate by shooting a number of enemies over the course of various rounds. Thankfully this does not reset to zero and you can resume the score on a new wave.

"Zero" presents you with different weapon/ship loadouts to start with. Each having different starting stats allowing you to change up the game immediately, rather than waiting on the RNG. These slowly unlock as you progress further in to the game. Admittedly, I only unlocked the second player.

Weapons range from the basic machine-gun shooter, to the typical spread or triple shot, slower high powered lasers, and limited ammo homing shots. Personally, the speed of these homing shots made them mostly useless for me. Sure, they add extra sprites on the screen that will kill things, and will eventually seek something out, but do not rely on them homing in to save you!

Aside from that, expect shields and nova attacks as drops. Yeah, they do what you would expect.

And ahhhh. Well, that's the game! It's just a simple arcade one.

Surprisingly fun though.

Despite the simplicity, I enjoyed this one. For $2USD you're not going to expect much, but it entertained me this afternoon.

Oh, and the chiptune music for "Zero" is really catchy.

Game Acquisition: Bundle Stars (Wrath 1)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 23 September 2018
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7 32 Bit or higher
Processor: 2 GHz
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Graphics: Сompatible with DirectX 9.0c
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 20 MB available space