Alien Front Online

Pros • Good old-fashioned tank mayhem • Wheel support • Nifty, if not entirely useful, voice chat • Destructible Environs	Cons • No Broadband • Leap of Faith system to join online games • Not what you'd call Deep • No split-screen
Bottom Line A solid and even somewhat innovative (if slightly-flawed) game with great looks, great levels and satisfying weapons; too bad there wasn't more of it. I LOVE THE SMELL OF BLACKENED GLASS IN THE MORNING It's sad, but true: Software reinforcements came a little too late for the Dreamcast; if we'd had a few more games like this one (and Worms World Party) a little earlier, DC enthusiasts might not be in quite the hull-breached banana boat they're in now. Oh well. Alien Front Online is still a tight little game with reliable tank combat, solid frame rates and Vigilante-8-worthy levels of environment destructibility...plus, you can dust off that Seaman microphone and put that puppy to some destructive use.

As the name implies, AFO puts players in a human-alien war, and puts it online for up to eight players (or, realistically, four--and a four-way game here is just fine). Both sides get the typical unit spread--light-and-fast, all-rounder, and drag-ass but powerful--and while the humans get pretty much the tanks you'd expect, the aliens have a weirder array that includes bi- and quadrupedal walkers and ground effect vehicles. Whether you choose the single-player structured missions or the relatively brainless arcade mode, you're in for a breezy, responsive mechanized war in which most of the scenery caught in the crossfire gets blown to bits in a most rewarding fashion; not merely destruction for destruction's sake, but natural formations and building fronts that get sheared off to reveal secrets and alternate routes. Interactive environments can make up for an awful lot of crummy graphics or gameplay oversights, but thankfully they don't have to here; AFO keeps up a respectable frame rate, offers plenty of attack types (including gravitic weapons and the badge of honor for any mech/action game as well as my personal favorite, The Nuclear Warhead), and even supports wheel controllers! Not too shabby.

AFO's big draw, of course, is the online play, and the fact that you can actually use the DC microphone for talking some in-game smack; hit the button, hunch down over that controller mic (it is a little awkward in the heat of battle, but hey, war is ugly) and rattle off the taunt or boast of your choice. The voices other players will hear momentarily are a little tinny but they're perfectly, even surprisngly understandable. Truth be told, it's more a gimmick than something that has deep tactical use (the game itself simply isn't that deep), but it's a really good gimmick, even allowing for the occasional voice-skip. While joining online games is easy, selecting an online game with any specificity is pretty much out the window, as you must rather blindly join games before finding out details such as how many humans/aliens there are respectively. As you can imagine, this can lead to exercises in lopsided frustration, but at least most games up to four players are reliably smooth and stable [supressing almost primal urge to make a bitter by-the-way about my beloved Worms World Party at this point]. On the relatively rare occasions where game stability does go down, you're booted, alas, all the way out of the game, rather than to lobby-limbo of some kind. It's all worth it the first time you score a really wicked hit and are able to hack on the victim in your own voice, though.

Oddly, the game offers no split-screen mode, so venturing online is your only choice for play against a live person; it's probably just as well, because with environments this attractive, you don't want them letterboxed or scrunched in any way (pay particular attention to the yucky-funny biomechanical alien installations--believe me, you'll know what I mean when you get there).

If you're looking at the whole Dreamcast situation in a rather dim light, AFO should raise your spirits. Pity it didn't come earlier--but at least it's here now, and it rocks, despite some small flaws. Good replay value can make a game go a long way. You'll also find typical flag-capture and deathmatch modes, of course, but for a serious workout the base attack/defense mode is particularly brutal. Get your friends in on these, and if you don't have any friends, make some.

Info & Screenshots