Alien Hominid Invasion takes the frantic personality of a classic arcade shooter and expands it into a highly replayable action experience built around unpredictable missions, character progression, and cooperative chaos. Developed and published by The Behemoth, it immediately carries the studio’s recognizable hand-drawn style and eccentric humor. Rather than relying on a straightforward sequence of stages, the game embraces an action-roguelike structure in which players repeatedly invade Earth, steal intelligence, sabotage enemy plans, defeat bosses, collect equipment, and strengthen their alien for increasingly dangerous encounters.
The combat is deliberately fast and restless. Staying mobile is essential as enemies arrive in large numbers and fill the screen with attacks. Players can blast opponents with an extensive selection of weapons while using acrobatic movement and alien abilities to escape dangerous situations. The controls encourage an aggressive rhythm where positioning, dodging, attacking, and quickly reacting to threats are more important than cautiously advancing through each area. When everything comes together, battles become delightfully chaotic, particularly when several players are simultaneously jumping around, firing weapons, and activating unusual abilities.
Progression adds considerable substance to the arcade-style foundation. Completing missions and leveling up allows aliens to mutate and acquire abilities such as increased speed, healing, and flight. Weapons, boosts, cosmetic options, alien heads, mutations, buffs, and debuffs can be combined to create different approaches to combat. Experimentation is therefore an important part of the experience. Instead of simply finding one powerful weapon and using it indefinitely, there is an incentive to test combinations and discover which equipment complements a preferred playstyle.
Another clever feature is the choice between Permakeep and Mastery Mode. Permakeep provides the more conventional progression experience by allowing players to retain their accumulated belongings, while Mastery Mode offers increased experience and improved drops at the cost of losing accumulated rewards upon death. This creates a meaningful risk-versus-reward decision without forcing harsher roguelike consequences on everyone. Three difficulty levels provide further flexibility, and multiplayer difficulty can even be adjusted individually. Friends with dramatically different skill levels can consequently participate in the same session without everyone being forced onto an identical challenge setting.
The campaign structure also avoids being completely linear. Neighborhoods are randomly assembled using hundreds of handcrafted city blocks, giving each invasion a degree of unpredictability while maintaining environments created with deliberate design rather than relying entirely on procedural generation. The objective is ultimately to reach enemy headquarters, but the journey includes missions, loot collection, Sewer Kid Hideouts, upgrades, mutations, and additional modifiers obtained through Mothership Data. These systems create a satisfying loop of fighting, collecting rewards, improving an alien, and returning to battle with new possibilities.
Cooperative play is arguably where the concept reaches its greatest potential. As many as four players can invade together using online co-op, couch co-op, or a combination of both. Multiplayer transforms already hectic encounters into wonderfully ridiculous spectacles as several aliens unleash different weapons and abilities at once. The individual difficulty settings are particularly valuable here because they make mixed-skill groups easier to accommodate. Single-player remains completely viable, but cooperative sessions amplify the humorous and unpredictable qualities of the combat.
The presentation complements this energetic gameplay extremely well. Hand-drawn characters have exaggerated expressions and fluid cartoon animations, while enemies, explosions, weapons, mutations, and environmental details maintain a consistently playful tone. Violence is presented with intentionally absurd humor rather than realism. The drawback is that the amount of activity can sometimes become visually overwhelming. With numerous enemies, projectiles, effects, environmental objects, and multiple players occupying the screen, recognizing an immediate threat can occasionally be more difficult than it should be.
Replayability is substantial because randomized neighborhood arrangements, equipment combinations, mutations, modifiers, difficulty options, and progression systems continually provide reasons to begin another invasion. However, the underlying mission structure can eventually feel repetitive for players who prefer carefully scripted campaigns. Procedural rearrangement cannot completely disguise familiar objectives and environmental pieces after extensive play. Anyone expecting a traditional linear run-and-gun sequel may also need time to become comfortable with the greater emphasis on loot, character builds, repeated missions, and roguelike-inspired progression.
Steam Deck compatibility is quite good overall. The game is classified as Playable rather than fully Verified. Its functionality is accessible through the default controller configuration, it displays appropriate Steam Deck controller icons, and its default graphics configuration performs well on the handheld. It also runs successfully under SteamOS. The primary issue preventing a completely seamless Deck experience is that some in-game text can be small and difficult to read on the portable screen. Aside from that readability concern, the controller-oriented action makes it naturally suited to handheld sessions.
Ultimately, this is an energetic reinvention that successfully combines arcade shooting with modern progression and roguelike concepts. Its greatest strengths are responsive combat, extensive customization, flexible difficulty, enjoyable cooperative support, charming artwork, and the freedom to experiment with unusual combinations of weapons and mutations. Repetition and occasional visual clutter keep the experience from being flawless, but the constant movement and unpredictable combat preserve much of its excitement. It works especially well for players who enjoy replayable action games that reward experimentation without taking themselves seriously.
Rating: 8/10
