Price: £24.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes Online: No Multiplayer between PSPs: No Alien Syndrome is a classic Sega arcade game from the '80s that was quite a bit of fun when it first started off, but nothing seems to have been improved upon for its 21st century update. As you walk down long corridors and open spaces, you'll go through the usual malarkey of collecting keycards and picking up powerups, while, at first, aliens slither towards you and they take forever to kill - and you still need to kill them to gain points to increase your skills at strength, dexterity, accuracy and endurance, the skills for which differ depending on the profession you select at the start of the game, such as sharpshooter, firebug and demolitions expert - so it's not as if you can just say "Nuts to this" and skirt round them because you'll never develop as a result; well, as much as you can develop because this is only a thinly-disguised attempt at an RPG and not a real one, since the emphasis is more along the lines of an arcade game.

In addition, there's lots of things you're good or not so good at, and it's the choice of profession that dictates these things, such as ability to melee, the strength of your armour, how good you are at combat, etc. On the plus side, here, you can strafe left/right while firing your weapons and eventually the baddies will break up and their smaller parts can be picked off... but then more come. You also have a robot helper called SCARAB which will chip in and do its best, but it's not exactly Alyx from Half Life in terms of the help it can give you. The graphics give you the right impression that you're on a space station littered with little else but creepy crawly aliens, but there's no particular WOW factor to it. Sound is functional with big bangs when you open up a crate of powerups and other bits and pieces but after a few of them you soon get used to it.

All that said, in Alien Syndrome there's still very little variety and it soon gets repetitive, so all these things which make it sound unique never really come into play in terms of grabbing your attention and making you feel more immersed in the game. Hence, and for the Simpsons fans amongst you, when your character dies and it says, "Aileen has perished. Would you like to play again?"... like Lee Carvello's Putting Challenge, the only answer in this poor game is "No."

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2007.