Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection is a solid package for fans of the shooter series

If you’re middle-aged and love shooting aliens, there’s a good chance you’ve played an Alien Breed game at some point during your life. This twin-stick top-down shooter series started all the way back in 1991, and while it’s not affiliated with the hugely successful film series, it may as well be.

To celebrate the series’ 35th anniversary, Commodore has decided to put together a collection of all the classic Alien Breed games released between 1991 and 1996. Some welcome improvements and extras have been thrown in, too, making Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection not only a great package for newcomers looking to get into the series, but also long-term fans.

Six games are included in Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection: Alien Breed, Alien Breed Special Edition ’92, Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues, Alien Breed: Tower Assault, Alien Breed 3D, and Alien Breed 3D: Killing Grounds. Some games even have multiple versions available, giving you an exhaustive insight into the history of the series.

As with most retro collections, some of the games here haven’t aged all that well, though it’s perhaps the ones you might not expect. You see, while Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D: Killing Grounds may be the newest games included in the package, first-person shooters have moved on a great deal since the mid-nineties. Twin-stick shooters, on the other hand, haven’t changed all that much.

So, while you might not get much fun out of the two first-person shooter entries in Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection, chances are you could sink considerable time into the rest. Tasking you with gunning down hordes of aliens while making your way through labyrinthine levels, you’ll need to manage your resources effectively.

As you move from Alien Breed to Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues and then Alien Breed: Tower Assault, you’ll find each game getting a little more complex, with new weapons into the mix and more. Alien Breed: Tower Assault is also a little less linear than its predecessors, with multiple level exits giving you more ways to complete the game.

It’s the extras here that will likely be most enticing to series fans, though. The Alien Breed Archives give you access to plenty of museum-like content, including box art for each game, their soundtracks, gameplay videos, and more. On top of that, there are also modes in the form of online co-op Rush and single-player Horde, presenting new ways to play.

Throw in features you’ve come to expect from retro collections such as this, from save states to a suite of visual options, and Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection likely won’t disappoint if you’re after some twin-stick alien action. It’s just a shame the first-person shooter entries here aren’t up to par with the rest of the games.

Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch and PC.