Alien Breed: Tower Assault
| Alien Breed: Tower Assault | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Team17 |
| Publisher(s) | Team17 |
| Distributor(s) | Ocean Software |
| Platform(s) | Amiga 1200/Amiga 4000, Amiga CD32, MS-DOS |
| Release date(s) | 1994 |
| Genre(s) | Run and gun |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Alien Breed: Tower Assault is the third game in the Alien Breed franchise, a series of science fiction-themed, top-down shooters. It was released in 1994 by Team17 for the Amiga, PC, and CD32, and it is the last 2D game in the series.
Setting
A deep space barracks receives a distress signal from a science facility on an otherwise uninhabited planet. With no idea what to expect, a small troop of soldiers are sent to search the planet for survivors and neutralize any threat.
Once the ships near the facility, however, automated security lasers begin attacking, picking the ships off one by one. Only two soldiers survive, crash-landing in the outer perimeter of the facility. The player takes control of the characters there as the game begins.
Gameplay
The game engine is a modified version of that used in Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues. One significant change is the inclusion of multiple exits for each level, making ABTA much less linear than its predecessors—the blurb on the back of the box boasts more than 276 possible ways of completing the game.
Other improvements include Retreat Mode, which allows the player to shoot one's weapon and walk backwards at the same time, although at a slightly slower speed.
Format variations
There are significant differences between the versions of the game released across different formats.
Amiga version
The Amiga version contains the full game spread across three 3.5" floppy disks in original protected form (Disks are RobNorthen PDOS protected, each disk is using longtracks (12 sectors per tracks) + 980 KB per disk), while the cracked version in the amigaDOS disk standard is spread over four disks. Note also that once installed on a hard drive, either in ECS or AGA version, each executables are checking from where the game is launched, and if it detects a launch from hard drive, it ask for the original disk 1 (this is the copy protection when installed).
CD32 version
This version of the game was supplied on a single CD, which contained the entire game preceded by a lengthy Full motion video intro sequence, which was relatively unusual for the time. The full AGA version of Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues is also bundled on the CD.
PC version
There were two versions of Tower Assault for the PC: a floppy version and a CD-ROM version. Both were ported by East Point Software.
The floppy version is quite different from the Amiga release, since it doesn't retain the non-linear architecture of the levels.[1]
The CD-ROM version, however, retained the non-linear level structure as well as the FMV intro and outro sequences from the CD32 version. Although the packaging states that Alien Breed II is also included, this is only correct for the Amiga CD32 release. Looking inside the PC CDROM contents, Alien Breed II is not present.