I’ve always been a fan of the Alien Breed series. No, not the underwhelming recent update by Team 17, but the classic Amiga/PC shooter series. It was simple, intense fun – claustrophobic corridors, limited resources and a never-ending stream of horrible alien bug-monsters pursuing you. While Frozenbyte’s Shadowgrounds series recaptured the essence of these games somewhat, Outpost: Haven manages to recapture the atmosphere almost perfectly, while adding some new tweaks to the formula.

While only 7 levels long, and not nearly as heavy on the enemy-spawning as the classic originals (which you can experience via a rather neat fan-remake here), this is a really quite atmospheric and polished game. Moody lighting and some well-managed jump scares such as classic hissing gas vents and dark-colored aliens lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce makes for solid, gritty style. It’s familiar stuff, controls-wise. Your choice of arrow keys, WSAD or others to move, mouse to aim and shoot and shift/space to change weapons or interact with stuff.

The shop terminal interface will be instantly familiar to Alien Breed fans.

As with Alien Breed, the key element here is resource management. Most doors on the derelict space station you’re exploring are locked. You need universal keycards to open them – one consumed for each door opened. Keycards are easily found, but are generally not as common as doors so occasionally you’ll have to resort to the slower, louder and riskier option of shooting the door open. Ammo for everything beyond your emergency backup pistol is limited, too, and new weapons have to be bought with the also-limited money that you find lying around. It’s pretty nerve-wracking to be on your last magazine with only a fragile door between you and five aliens.

Realtime lighting and a modern achievement system are nice additions.

Some of the sounds are obviously lifted from other sources, and what little voice-acting there is falls a little flat, but you could do a lot worse than losing a couple of hours to this, especially if you were a PC/Amiga game through the early 90s. It also adds a few modern tweaks like an achievement system to track progress and reward XP. There’s also a set of survival challenge levels for those wanting a quick pick-up-and-play challenge, and a global high-score board, although sadly without any way to directly compare your score to friends. Yeah, it’s just another bug hunt, but it’s equal parts nostalgic and modern, and good fun. Well worth a play.

[Outpost: Haven]