Aliens: The Roguelike is a tactical roguelike, inspired by the classic Aliens movie and the Alien Breed: Tower Assault computer game.
The story is simple and traditional: in the year 2209, the colony Giger V sends out a distress call before stopping all communication. You are the fortunate soul who is to investigate this unexpected event. Unfortunately, your ship is shot down on approach; fortunately, you survive. Now enter the colony, stripped of your comrade and equipment, and go kick that alien queen’s ass!
The game begins with character creation. Select one of five classes, like Marine, Scout, Medic etc. There are no attributes, instead, each class has different costs for improving the seven skills, three skills for handling weapons (sidearms, light or heavy weapons) and four others that improve your speed, reload time, throwing accuracy or the effect of medpacks. The final step before beginning your quest is to invest initial points in certain skills—choose wisely!
You now start to explore the seven towers, each with several levels, to find the alien queen. You are only shown your immediate surroundings on the top-down map, and you have a limited view distance and can’t look around corners, so you’re in for some nasty surprises… the greenish text graphics and the ominous background music help to create this nice paranoid Aliens atmosphere.
Of course, you will encounter many aliens during the game—juveniles, workers, warriors, and, who knows, maybe even the queen? Some of them are quite easy to kill, some of them harder, but none should be underestimated. They are not able to open doors, so closing in front of his ugly nose one can save your sorry life.
You will find weapons and ammunition, grenades, armor and medpacks to help you on your quest, but you will have to select your tactics carefully to survive: You can only carry one weapon of each type, as well as limited ammunition only. The weapons use different ammo and have different characteristics—for example, shotguns are handy for blasting several enemies at once, but they are no good against armored targets.
You also should not forget to reload after each fight! Gameplay is entirely turn-based, yet, each action takes a different amount of time, so being able to reload faster or move quicker can make the difference between life and death—so be sure to check the character screen to see if you have gained enough experience to increase one of the skills!
