Sometimes I score games on innovation, other times I might score them on realism, entertainment, lasting appeal, multiplayer, or features that are truly genre defining. It's been a while since I played an extremely good game. But Alien Hominid isn't just a game, no. It's a retro blast from the past, a collection of fun memories for anybody over eighteen who is old enough to appreciate 2D side-scrolling, fast paced action. I've never scored a game on 'retroness' before and sometimes I feel that this is exactly the type of game we are lacking. We have plenty of 3D shooters, most of them being online, plenty of RPG games, loads and loads of racing games, adventure, action, violence. We have them all, except decent retro feeling titles. I don't know why developers have overlooked the true potential of an old yet new feeling 2D retro game (and let's be honest, those few that appeared have been generally lacking), but now, even if other developers considered doing one, Alien Hominid would be a hard act to follow.

You can't help but smiling right from that start. You are introduced to the game by an extremely funny video that familiarises you with some of the characters you'll be seeing. There's the main cute little yellow Alien, 'Fat Kid' who gives you power-ups from time to time and there's the men in black who all look the same. Just think agents from the Matrix; big sun-specs, formally dressed, they all look the same and there are millions of them! But that's only for starters - as you progress, look out for the Soviet agents! I really love Fat Kid. He wears a backpack, a little baseball cap and a jumper with a fork on. He is pure comedy in himself.

Which brings me onto one of the major selling points of Alien Hominid - it's just a laugh. One big screamer. I haven't laughed and kept on laughing through a game for a long time. Every level is scattered with comedy - from Fat Kid being throttled and hung upside down by the FBI for loose change, to buildings and shops with innuendo-ridden names. The way everything is animated is just perfect as well - the expressions from the FBI are priceless. I might get my Alien to jump on one of the FBI's heads and bite it off. The other FBI men that saw me do that now open their mouths and scream like little girls. Sounds great, looks great and keeps the player smiling. What more could you want?

This Alien may be yellow and cute but he is one of the most violent aliens out there, armed with a knife, a gun of many uses, dirty tricks like the head biting mentioned above and a full bag of 'kick ass' to boot. He can scurry under the ground and then wait for somebody to walk over him before sticking his hand out, grabbing their leg and pulling the foe down. He can use his gun as fast as your fingers can press the fire button, or you can charge his gun up for a devastating attack. You can use the gun in four directions too - up, down, left and right. By firing it down while in mid-air, you can buy yourself some extra air time - and I'm not talking about a Vodafone top-up card! You can roll about, dodge bullets and, when you're close enough, whip the knife out and slice up your enemies. Animated violence is the best type of violence!

Thanks to Fat Kid and sometimes a little bit of luck, you are given or sometimes find power-ups. These look like different coloured orbs and they give you a little shield or alter your gun and grenades accordingly. Fat Kid seems to have all of the orbs in his backpack, so when you see him he keeps on pulling new orbs out every couple of seconds. If you have a favourite, you can walk into your favourite orb as and when he pulls it out. There are loads of different orbs - some worth a mention are the icy blue orb, which makes your guns and grenades freeze people (and shatter them into millions of pieces) and there's a fiery red orb, which turns your gun into a flamethrower to cremate your enemies and your fire grenades cause devastating effects on your foes. It's nice to experiment with them and all these power-ups add lots of variety to the run and shoot gameplay.

The levels are nice and varied as they are though - the classic levels see you running along, killing, stopping at obstacles to either blow them up or get around them and defeating the more-than-occasional bosses that appear. The bosses are fantastic fun, if not a little frustrating, but that's what gives it the old school feel. In fine retro tradition, the bosses all have some type of weakness. You might have to shoot the head to defeat that robot, or trick this machine into blowing itself up with some clever manoeuvring. Some levels keep true to the side scrolling action but throw some vehicles into the mix. One level sees you on a motorway, jumping from roof to roof, with the ability to actually steal these cars from the top. In fact, vehicles appear on lots of levels and you can steal many of them, from army tanks to ice cream vans. It's funny to see your Alien shoot out of the window too!

Another level saw me in my spaceship, caught up in an Asteroids type affair, pressing a button to move in one direction and another to shoot. Thankfully this one was a little bit more advanced and it was a little easier to turn your ship, but it was great to see some more memories in the mix and great that the gameplay is so varied.

The game is hard though - maybe I should have mentioned this to start with. Even on Easy mode, the game might come as a little bit of an uphill struggle to gamers that aren't up to the challenge. It's true, the gameplay does take a bit of mastering, but we all like a challenge, don't we? I do at least - and you can't expect a retro game to be easy, because games in those days were always stuck on hard mode [Aye lad, back in t' good old days jumpin' 'ad to be pixel perfect. One pixel wrong and you lost a life. You youngsters today don't know 'ow cushy you've got it! Ancient Ed]. But if the heat's too much to bear, why not call upon a friend? Plug in a second pad, press start and a second alien with a hat appears. Now it's time to really kick some butt. On most occasions, a friend can help you play on the same screen. That's just fantastic if you ask me! What's more, you can customise your Aliens with hats and individual names - I had my Alien wearing a Viking hat while my friend had his Alien wearing a bandanna. Comedy genius!

Talk about a game that keeps on giving too; there are loads of mini games to unlock, some with multiplayer support and then, the little marvel at the end of the tunnel, PDA games. The menu is in PDA fashion, so this makes perfect sense. These games look like little drawn levels with drawn stick men and drawn bad guys. These games are fantastic fun and challenging, but what made my day is the ability to make my own PDA games! It has a level editor! It was like Christmas morning for me, I absolutely love to make my own levels and things like that. Sure, you can't make proper game levels with cel-shaded 2D goodness, but you can make little blocky drawn-looking fully interactive levels.

The level editor comes with many levels of interaction. Firstly, select where you want the stick man to start and where you want the level to end. The objective always remains the same - kill the enemies on screen. To kill them you simply have to jump on their heads but you can make that task difficult with all the separate bricks you can place. You can lay down little traps that see spikes coming out of the ground, you can put down shark infested water, squares that break after standing on them, ladders, boulders that can be pushed and moved, ships to sail on the shark infested waters - build your 2D dream, stick some enemies with or without guns down and try to get your friends and family to complete the near impossible level you've just made from scratch. I spent hours on this, making impossible levels, putting my domains through beta tests and making sure that, with perseverance, these levels could be beat. Alas, there was a way - but my friends gave up after dying a total of 20 times each. This would have been even better if you could have shared the levels online!

The graphics are perfect, beautiful cel-shading goodness. Colourful, imaginative, artistically rich - it just makes the game what it is. A great feeling of retro with a strong sense of renovation - like an old house done up with new decorations, preserving elements from the old, mixed in with rudiments of the new. Backgrounds are drawn with detail and care, foregrounds and characters are animated with style and class. It's as if everything has been done with the player in mind. The artist in charge probably asks himself if the player notices the amount of work gone into the graphical side of things. Yes, yes I have taken notice of the surroundings; the vibes of sheer excitement the cel-shading gives off has blown me away. It's just so enthusiastic and begs to be seen.

The sound department must have worked closely with the artists behind the graphics. Every sound brings the graphics to another dimension of life. Graphics are in 2D but with sound like this, it gives it both departments that extra edge. The music provides atmosphere; sometimes serious atmosphere but mostly jolly, laid-back, colourful ambience to match the graphics. Sounds that characters provide give off a clear message and because there are no voices in the game, it's great that the little noises along with the pulling power of the graphics can tell a story so well. I enjoyed all the Alien sounds, laser beams, spaceships and all of those things - if all games graphics and sound went hand in hand like Alien Hominid, then I'd be in gaming heaven.

Alien Hominid far surpassed my expectations, although, if I'm honest, I didn't know what to expect. I thought that maybe the world had moved away from 2D fast paced retro action but after only five minutes of playing, I could see that the world of gaming just doesn't have enough of it. It's a shame that Alien Hominid ends - that's my only gripe with the whole game. It ends. But then, you can play through it again and again with friends, turning up the difficulty a notch each time. You can also beat your scores again and again too and who wouldn't want to play through this a few more times, if not only to take notice of the fantastic surroundings? Alien Hominid is the most addictive game I've played in ages and the tongue in cheek gameplay makes this work of art a must have. Everyone should be able to appreciate the amount of effort and care locked up inside; this game just goes to show that 2D really can sometimes be better than 3D. Just buy it.

Reviewed by Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).