Alien armageddon is a mod I've liked for a long time...Until recently, it's been fairly well balanced and does what it is supposed to do fine.. What it does is alter duke3d to add the following things into the game:
-new characters to play as besides duke
-rpg elements
-new enemies and guns introduced into any level
-weapon upgrades got through a money system
-player stat upgrades and misc player upgrades gotten through a money system
-you can save the podfems
-many more
these features up to the recent 4.5 version were done really well... you had rpg elements including levelups for your guns and your character. Each character had new guns and unique upgrades... Any user map you played this with would have the new weapons and enemies put in them... The new enemies are well done, not limited to railgun aliens, armored pigcops, laser cannon troopers, terminator ripoffs, aliens on mounted gun turrets, weird animal like aliens that zap you and leap at you, armored enforcers, grenade spamming ultra battlelords, ant like aliens armed with smgs that walk along ceilings sometimes, and more... New weapons include alien laser pistols, plasma rifles, a smg, clusterbombs, meteor shooting devastators...
Each original gun can now be upgraded to be more powerful... Shotguns can be upgraded to be 3 times more powerful and can shoot radiation shells too... Chainguns can be upgraded to be miniguns. rocket launchers can be upgraded to shoot homing missiles. Pipebombs can be upgraded to be cluster bombs, shrinker can be upgraded in some new way, devastator can be upgraded to fire 4 barrels at once rather than 2, freezers can be upgraded to be more powerful in some new way as well... This all works well but the upgrades cost a lot of money so you barely ever have the money to use them... you are spending most of your money to give yourself player upgrades like regenerating shields as the damage enemies do is upgraded over normal duke3d.
The mod comes with at least 3 new episodes. 2 out of 3 are based on sunstorm interactives expansion packs duke it out in dc and duke carribean. The other new one "new invasion" is very short but hard as hell so it's not really fun at all... A new episode added called space gladiators is really dumb, forcing you to play multiplayer like matches against bots instead of blowing up dumb aliens so I would avoid that too...
Luckily the new attrition mode is there to try to save the show. Based on the mod of the same name, you play through 30+ custom maps selected randomly each time. The choices are really good but there are still some bad choices such as dogville, billy boy's awful maps and tons of maps that are bland ripoffs of the roch series that suck... To be perfect, the player should have been given infinite level tokens in this mode as a lot of duke3d maps are not as good as the original 3d realms maps and rely on stupid puzzle solving, jumping up to non obvious rooftops to get keys, multiple uses of the same key color that can break the map if you go for the wrong one, and worse. These maps needed to be stripped out of the attrition mode but unfortunately these kinds of maps are far more popular than the infinitely better "normal" duke3d maps like 3drealms maps, alejandro gavic maps, pipeline maps, james duncan maps and maps that don't involve stupid roch ripoff crap like dogville and billy boy maps. It would be good if such maps were stripped out.
Unfortunately level tokens are hardcoded so you can't just mod in 999 tokens given at the start to skip crap maps. Issues with level difficulty in attrition also make attrition somewhat annoying as well... Some maps are clearly way too hard on peice of cake difficulty even, and even the new original episodes suffer from this. However, most of the maps chosen can be beaten, if you just use a good shield, upgrade your guns in advance and similar, until version 4.5 anyway.
Unfortunately without regen shields, and upgraded weapons, alien armageddon tends to be an unbalanced mess.. Many enemies tend to do too much damage. Armored pigcops are a nightmare unless your shielded, terminators can be nasry, etc... Tanks are much worse... Especially ones in episode 1. E1l2 is almost impossible for a non shielded char. Even on peice of cake.... In my honest opinion duke boss needs to do some serious balancing fixes for this mod. Especially in 4.5
4.5 is flat out unplayable at times... In e3l4 one armored pigcop killed a 150 health, shielded character in one shot on peice of cake, even though I modded the aauser.con to make it easier.. Dukeboss must be trying to make this thing "hrrrgghhh hard as fuck hurrgggh" because it seems every version is harder than the previous, and if you keep doing that it becomes an unbalanced pile of crap. The modding of aauser.con didn't prevent the now unbalanced as terminators from grabbing me and taking off 75 points of health on peice of cake... It's flat out unbeatable on easy now... And to make things worse, dodging enemies are there now to infuriate you. Assault troopers are now so hard to kill as they fly and dodge around that they become as hard as newbeasts on peice of cake. I am not making that up. This mod now needs a SERIOUS rebalance! Ditch the dodging enemies dukeboss, make the terminators do less damage, shielded players need to take way less damage to an armored picgop, an enemy I can take out with the pistol in 4.31 but not in 4.5. And before fuckers start bringing up the whole "git gud" bullshit, I've beaten tons of duke3d usermaps that are far harder than the original maps like lrwb, when scum returns, duke plus maps and more. Enough of the unbalanced crap dukeboss! People should seriously stop trying to over difficulty push mods now and delete old versions... By now the far better balanced 4.31 is gone off moddb and people will get pwned in 4.5 trying to play normal duke3d maps. It needs to be fized. "Rebalancing" something by making it unbearably hard needs to stop. Too many game mods do this. It was already hard enough dukeboss!
For this reason I can't give the mod a good score. This thing USED to be good people. Not anymore. This thing now is so bad that I would avoid it till it gets fixed... If ever. And avoid that new character, fuck characters you can't play unless you play some ultra uber unbalanced addon episode. You don't over advertise this character and then lock it like that dukeboss, that is a dick move.
If any of you could provide a perminant 4.31 download It would be good. That was balanced, unlike 4.5. But due to moddb's stupid policy of only having the latest version on there and dukebossses compliance with that, this mod has now become terrible.... Avoid... Play my mom instead... At least that is balanced and has bearable fun levels and infinite randomly generated maps.
