Jay, Zed and the gang are back in Men In Black - Alien Assault. This overhead shooting game is fairly well done. My interest was even held to the point where I finished the entire game in the matter of a week. Not bad on a mobile phone.

Men In Black - Alien Assault

Version 1.0.34

Developer: C4M and Elocom Mobile Entertainment

Publisher: Ojom 

The story in Men in Black: Alien Assault is that you are Jay and of course work for Alien Immigration, the Men in Black. An evil alien has a plan to clone and destroy the entire planet. Man if I had a Euro for every time I heard that plan...well I'd have a Euro actually.

This game won't win any awards for graphics but they're good enough to maintain interest and for a mobile game that's really what you need. There are several different MiB and a handful of different aliens. The levels are detailed and active. By active I mean that some lights flicker, some things move, NPCs walk back and forth and seem to try to get in your way as much as they can at times.

The sound in Men in Black: Alien Assault is ok. The main theme is good but then during gameplay sounds are lacking. Your guns make a sound and that's about it really. It's a shame because I think more sounds would have added to the game immensely.

The controls are the standard 2,4,6,8 for movement and 5 for fire. You can't move and fire. Of course this is a limitation of the mobile phone platform because the keypad on a mobile phone is not made for two keys to be depressed simultaneously. But it doesn't take away from the game all that much.

 What does take away from the game is its instability. At times the game completely locked up on me and I had to kill the app and restart. Annoying when you're 75% through one of the longer levels. Also at times the auto-aim was non-functional. You would turn one direction and go to shoot and the game would turn you in another direction wasting a shot, getting you hurt and wasting ammo. You have unlimited ammo in the game but power-ups provide for special, increased damage, ammunition which is useful as well as scarce.

In the game you must take control of Jay and move him through each level to complete a goal. Generally this means shooting every alien you see and on occasion solving some basic logic puzzle with moving blocks. Essentially you can just shoot your way through most levels without even taking the movement of the blocks into consideration. There was never a place where I moved them and then had to restart because I was stuck. Aside from shooting crates and barrels of explosives the only other thing to shoot is the aliens themselves. But if an alien comes into contact with a human you need to neuralize the human so they forget they met an alien. Without this key feature it just wouldn't be a Men in Black game now would it?

But the flaws in the game are minor annoyances and I was still able to easily beat the game. Perhaps too easily as a matter of fact. The last alien, the big bad boss...wasn't so big and bad and as I was playing through the game I was kind of waiting for the big bid to see how they would do it. Well they just made a slightly harder to kill version of one of the other aliens in the game. Bummer, but still effective.

 Overall Men in Black: Alien Assault is a good little top-down shooter and definitely worth buying. Ojom did the franchise proud with this title. Maybe if this one does well we can see another MiB title in the future with a more in-depth story and some added gameplay features.

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