Alienation

Alienation is an isometric twin-stick shooter game set in a future in which aliens are invading Earth. After a large portion of the population has been murdered or mutated, humanity's fate rests with a group of four soldiers from UNX (a military group assembled to help prevent alien attacks). The game features a single-player mode, a local co-op mode, and a multiplayer mode that allows four people to play at once, with each player controlling a heavily modified soldier from one of three character classes: Bio-Specialist, Saboteur, and Tank. Each class has its own weapons, movement mechanics, and abilities, and can be "leveled up" to level thirty.

The Bio-Specialist can heal other team members and create poisonous trails. The Tank is able to create a shield behind which players can stand and can "blow everything away", allowing players to maneuver more easily. The Saboteur has the ability to become invisible, and can call in airstrikes when needed. Players defend themselves against hordes of aliens through increasingly-difficult levels.

Alienation was developed by Finnish video game company Housemarque and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It was released on April 26, 2016 exclusively for the PlayStation 4. The game, first hinted at in January 2014, was announced at the 2014 Sony Gamescom conference. In a question-and-answer article on the PlayStation Blog in April 2014, Mikael Haveri of Housemarque said that they are inspired for many of their games by other games.

Haveri cited Dark Souls and Demon's Souls as examples, saying that they "take a concept [the developers] like and try and improve it or put a twist on it". According to Haveri, Alienation would have content (such as better explosion mechanics) which players had not seen before. He noted the chance of references to other Housemarque games, similar to how the incorporation of Resogun ships into Dead Nation.

Alienation was met with positive reviews from video-game critics upon release. It received a score of 79 out of 100 on the review aggregator website Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Many reviewers praised the game's twin-stick mechanics, with Jordan Devore of the video-game blog Destructoid calling it "one of the best-feeling twin-stick shooters" he had ever played. Matt Miller wrote for the video-game magazine Game Informer that in multiplayer mode, Alienation had some of the best twin-stick shooting gameplay available. According to Ben Tyrer of GamesRadar, although the game's maps might not be memorable, its twin-stick shooting mechanics and design were.

Its cooperative gameplay was preferred by critics over single-player mode, but critics were confused by the game's lack of local co-op. On GameSpot, a video-game news website, Jason D'Aprile praised Alienation's cooperative gameplay but was frustrated by the lack of a local mode, though he said that "with a full troop online" the game was "easily one of the best all-out action multiplayer games in recent memory". In David Jenkins' review for the British news site Metro, the co-op was "fun no matter what". On USgamer, Jaz Rignall was puzzled about it not being a feature when the game was released, saying that it would be the "perfect game for couch co-op".