After escaping Osiris base in the last game, we find our hero's shuttle taken to the Indomitable, an Earth military ship, where he then awakens in the quarantine bay. He soon discovers that there is no rescuer to meet, that the ship has been attacked, and that it is by the aliens, and his job is to escape again. As a sequel to the marvelous Alien Breed 3D, what should follow is a game that showcases the best of the Amiga 1200's capabilities, with thick atmosphere and combat, sophisticated multiplayer, and possibly interactive elements, all exceeding the entirety of great games ever released on the Amiga, including Team17's own ingenuous classic, Worms. Not quite. Rather, I think I just described Quake II.

Interestingly, Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds (TKG) comes in two varieties, each on a disk: 2MB and 4MB, the latter requiring two megabytes of expanded RAM and another disk for the sound effects. The 4MB one is no doubt the one that should be played, but its shipping proved something of an afterthought. Testing it in Amiga Forever with A1200 settings produced sluggish frame rates, a famous critique then, that became barely acceptable with an expensive 68040 CPU. Presumably, the performance was stellar with a 68060 accelerator card, but the less fortunate were condemned to a tiny resolution, with all the ugly black surrounding the screen. If that is too taxing, the grudgingly better-designed 2MB version steps in. It is visually inferior even to the original AB3D, with textureless floors and ceilings, the still-small screen, and 2×2 pixels instead of 1×1, making objects from afar disgustingly faint, yet even with the wimpy, non-upgraded hardware, it was playable, at least up until the larger levels. During my replay, I switched to the 2MB version after level 1 (which I had completed in that version beforehand). It is nice that progress is saved on a separate levels disk. What the game was really designed for was the Amiga 4000 for businesses, guaranteeing frames at the expense of a player base.

If you do get it running smoothly, you will learn, as my score suggests, that TKG is stunningly mediocre; everything from the basics to some partially realized details is in place, but it all feels off. For insight into what went wrong, we shall turn to none other than Team17's Andrew Clitheroe, the lead programmer and chief designer of this game, as well as AB3D. To begin, the game's technology is awesome, with all the lighting, the 3D models, and crisp graphics. It truly looked as good as the screenshots in the Amiga magazines. Alas, the game did not know how to use its potent strength. Apart from the severe frame stutters, it is largely due to the gameplay and content. Clitheroe explains he blew his time on the rendering engine and spent too little on carving out ideas and levels. The result became something that impressed at first glance before letting down.

In true Alien Breed fashion, TKG retains the series' horror elements, with the goal being to just escape. There is always the possibility of danger lurking ahead or around a corner, all intent on smashing the hero into a thin red paste. The differences are that, like AB3D, the game is fast-paced, is all viewed from the protagonist's eyes to its creepy atmosphere's advantage, and there are no terminals that dispense weaponry and items for credits or infinitely spawning aliens. The story, still conveyed in text only and now redundant at this point, continues to fill the mind with imagination, and some of the hero's thoughts on the current situation now appear at the bottom of the screen. As always, the player completes levels by running from point A to point B, with a few objectives like "kill X" and "destroy this object". All five weapons from the last game return, including my favorite, the grenade launcher, but new to this game are the assault rifle and a gun that fires bouncing lasers, and they all have nice models. The assault rifle deserves special mention, as it is capable of drilling bullet holes into the enemy. The plasma and laser guns can be set to fire more bolts at a time in a dispersed manner, suitable for vaporizing large or multiple enemies. Proximity mines are the only questionable addition, as the enemy leaves little room for their use. By the end of level 5, the player will have picked up all eight weapons, as well as an anti-gravity device (jet pack) that can be charged up to five seconds indefinitely at a terminal. Each lacks an ammo capacity, but they all must be used economically.

The alien marines return as average battle droids, and the big red ones equipped with flashlights and an assault rifle are frightening for a relatively common baddie. The 3D models look great, but most enemies are still 2D sprites, and one type - the freakish red doglike creature with a gaping, ravenous mouth - is actually pulled straight out of the game's predecessor as further evidence that TKG was built on top of AB3D, and was not properly finished. More importantly, the enemy is capable of nasty damage, but the player can collect medkits without fear of a maximum health limit. However, how it presents a challenge leaves me bittersweet. Reenter Clitheroe, who tells us that, while cramming ideas left out of AB3D into the sequel, he made the aliens sensitive to the player's sounds, and they would locate the source of the sound in groups, splitting up if it could have come from multiple directions. It certainly felt as if the aliens were ambushing me from all sides, and it all quickly gets harder after level 1. Nonetheless, they were predictable. Besides getting clipped to walls and the red doglike creatures biting from a distance that should make it impossible, the aliens are not much intelligent either. They cannot open doors and are too stupid to physically block the player. I restarted only once on my first run, on level 7 for failing to escape a room with toxic sludge in time, and twice on my second run, on level 2 due to a silly mistake and on level 15 because the slow frame rates made dodging harder. In other words, being tough does not make them bright. Contrary to how the series portrays Team17's breed of aliens, this game's specimens' asininity makes fighting them farcical.

The levels have generally good outlines and textures, but they are virtually featureless and undecorated, despite their many large rooms and halls. No exit signs either, not even explosive barrels. It is a good thing an automap of explored areas is included. TKG is not a true 3D game, owing to its said sprite usage, lack of slopes, and the fact that the rooms rarely ever stack over one another. After all, jet-packing over a toxic floor still hurts the player. It is now possible to look up and down, but that is limited. Thankfully, crashes are rare, having happened in the 4MB version twice on level 15 on my first run and one other time since, all apparently from going underwater.

Typically, I disregard a single, minor design flaw, but it is incredible when they are so many and so glaring, and that makes me peevish. For example, if the mouse is used, one must move forward with the left mouse button and fire with the right, with those actions disabled on the keyboard. Keyboard-only players be unconcerned, but if they are facing straight or spinning at the time they enter midair, they are stuck facing straight or spinning until their feet find the ground. Therefore, I prefer mouse mode. Miraculously, I adapted to the awkward control scheme later on, but it gets worse. Team17 has (for once!) replaced the level password system with one that saves progress, but only between levels. That would have been fine if the save slots were not limited to five, as opposed to 15 - the same number of levels minus the first. Keep in mind there is plenty of room for human error with no limits on health or ammo, and one may wish to retry a level to improve both statistics.

With TKG, it seems Team17 had finally appreciated the importance of playing over a modem and a network, with up to eight players allowed at a time and the host being able to customize the rules of the game. Just kidding, the multiplayer still involves a serial connection with all doors open, no monsters, and two players fighting endlessly in any of the game's 16 levels (except the last, another flaw) until either dies. Thrilling. As a final note, Team17 supplied copies of the game with editors - something missing in their splendid AB3D - that allow players to change anything from textures and light sources to weapons, items, and even alien logic. Sounds good, but if only things were so simple. In the words of Amazing Computing, "a whole disk's worth of files were missing", so not only were owners forced to download a patch from Aminet for the editors, but by the time Clitheroe released the game's source code, only one level had been uploaded there. Coincidence? Sadly, I think not.

VERDICT: It is hard to tell how serious Team17 was about its ambitions, which was apparently to deliver its take on Quake, and it amazes me how well-received (up to the mid 90s) The Killing Grounds was then. What I see is just Alien Breed 3D, but upsized, with bells and whistles and admittedly badly-needed editors, and lacking QA and polish. It is slow, suffers from perhaps the worst code optimization in a commercial Amiga game, and even when it does run well, no amount of digital trickery can hide the fact that it is just boring and buggy. The game is Team17's Daikatana moment, but instead of development problems plaguing the project, I am convinced it was simply underfunded. It is a wonder why they even bothered, let alone not considered that the beefy DOS might have been a better pick than the "doomed" Amiga. For all that went wrong, the game surely looked good on that system. It helps that the source code is out, and the mods greatly bring the game to Clitheroe's vision of what the conclusion of the original Alien Breed games should have been.

The action genre features fast-paced, thrilling, and intense sequences of physical feats, combat, and excitement. The characters of these stories are involved in daring and often dangerous situations, requiring them to rely on their physical prowess, skills, and quick thinking to overcome challenges and adversaries.

The horror genre features stories that aim to elicit fear, suspense, and a sense of dread in its audience. Horror stories often explore themes related to the unknown, the supernatural, and the macabre, and they frequently evoke strong emotional reactions such as anxiety, terror, and unease.

The sci-fi genre, short for science fiction, features imaginative and futuristic concepts that are often rooted in scientific principles, technology, and possibilities. These stories delve into "what if" questions and can serve as a platform to address contemporary social, political, and ethical issues by projecting them onto future or alternate settings.

James Earl Jones and David Prowse in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

After drifting unconscious in space for weeks, Captain Reynolds awakens on board an Earth battle cruiser, but soon finds no rescuers to greet, and he relives the horror of being the sole survivor of the last alien attack.

Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds (1996)

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Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds

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