Operation: Alpha Zylon Demo

Sidescrollers were a big thing back during the 8-bit era, but technology has advanced enough for them to become rather obsolete, unless it’s for nostalgia purposes or just indie productions displaying interesting new ideas. However, the rise of 3D graphics pretty much turned all the major developers away from the genre, since they are all concerned with state-of-the-art graphic engines, motion capturing devices and various other gimmicks.

Operation: Alpha Zylon has a different take on the situation and it would appear that the developers wanted to bring back sidescrollers, but keep the 3D graphics as well. The result isn’t pretty, but not because the idea was bad in itself, but because everything about the game is incredibly awkward, unpolished and painful, starting with the story, continuing with the gameplay and ending with the horrendous controls.

As far as the story is concerned, it all revolves around terrorists and nuclear weapons, which is about as cliche-istic as it can get without involving Sylvester Stallone as well. The protagonist happens to be an incredibly bold and well-trained US Army soldier, who goes on missions equipped with nothing but an over-sized knife. Naturally, that would be just fine and quite interesting, if the 2D environments and the scripted encounters would not make stealth an impracticality.

The game plays in the manner you would expect, in the sense that you have to go from left to right and kill enemies, jump over obstacles and generally get involved in scripted events that require quick reactions. However, these things are quite difficult to achieve when the controls are gruesome and the mechanics themselves lack polishing. As an example, you can stab an enemy from about two meters away, but you may very well miss him if you are occupying the same space.

The designers did not overwork themselves either, since the environments and the landscapes are very dull and lacking in detail. Dull sand dunes and the occasional military base are about the only things you will see along the way, which gets boring after about five minutes. To make matters worse, you cannot save and you have to retry the entire level if you happen to die at any point.

Although you can laugh at Operation: Alpha Zylon for about five minutes, even that gets annoying at one point and you are forced to conclude that it doesn’t offer anything you might want. In essence, even the worst first-person shooter can defeat this game quality-wise, as long as it allows you to move freely and shoot enemies.