On its face, Alien Hominid is an incredibly stylish Metal Slug clone. Instead, it turns out to be a shiny, bloody cartoon you can play by a team of guys who wanted to make a shiny, bloody cartoon you can play. The developers want you to take as much delight in seeing your little yellow alien avatar blasting and slicing and jumping and flying as they did making it. It's telling that it's based on a game originally hosted on Newgrounds, a site known as much for its animation as its games, as Alien Hominid is as much cartoon as game.

That's not to say it's one of those non-interactive FMV game nightmares from the early days of the CD-ROM. The developers, a team named The Behemoth, followed heavily in the footsteps of games like Metal Slug and Gunstar Heroes, a gameplay template that anyone can pick up and play, if not necessarily excel at. The hero, the eponymous alien hominid, has to blaze his way, from the left side of the screen to the right, blasting through masses of FBI agents, KGB grunts, and Area 51 guards. The melee attacks and grenades, along with the overblown mega-violence, will be very familar to Metal Slug fans in particular.

Because it's a cartoon, though, you won't just be shooting and blasting; there's a constant barrage of wacky things to do. The hominid might be hopping from car to car (each of which can be hijacked and driven until it's trashed) on the roofs as they speed down the highway, riding a giant yeti as it devours hapless Soviet soldiers, or flying through space shooting down the FBI's space fleet. Because he's a cartoon, the hominid even dies in a variety of cartoonish ways; each different kind of attack vaporizes or dismembers or bifurcates him a different way. Even the hallowed video game convention of dropping back in on your next life, good as new, fits into this cartoonish sort of vibe.

All of this chaos is going on in a colorful animated world. Behemoth has created a whimsical world, the kind of place where it makes perfect sense that a tiny yellow alien is fighting hordes of squared-headed, alien-hating FBI agents tooth and nail. It's the kind of place with stores like "House of Nut" or "Steakery Cakery," where a fat kid keeps glowing powerups in his backpack, and where the FBI conceals their nefarious alien-hunting plans with cunning signs with messages like "FBI - WE KILL ALIENS" and "Nothing to see here." In a place like this, it only makes sense that there are bosses like a massive robot tank clearly marked "CAUTION - DO NOT DAMAGE FACE," a gigantic jet-powered robot teddy bear, and a radioactive mutant butterscotch pudding monster, just to name a few.

All of this stylistic cartoon presentation is made possible by compromises that keep Alien Hominid from being able to stand with games like Gunstar Heroes or Metal Slug as pure shooters, though. These games are carefully honed exercises in control and memorization, giving them Zen-like quality. Alien Hominid, on the other hand, is colorful and distracting and over-the-top in a way games with similar gameplay are not, making it both more accessible and less pure.

Part of this is graphical sloppiness. Everything has rough edges, especially the explosions. This lends to Alien Hominid's charm, but explosions or on-screen objects often conceal enemy bullets. Sometimes things even cross in the foreground, in between you and the action. When you might have up to a half-dozen or so enemies on screen, it's easy for a shot to go unseen. Nothing like getting killed by a bullet you couldn't even see to make a game feel cheap.

This cheapness is exacerbated by occasional random death. Several areas involve infinitely- or randomly-spawning enemies, which can make for unpredictable deaths. Enemies will drop from the top of the screen and shoot you before you have any chance to react, or they'll shoot you from offscreen, or they'll throw arcing grenades that can only be dodged by running in a direction that doesn't allow you to fire back. Extra lives and continues are plentiful, and completion-oriented gamers can restart from any completed stage, but it's distracting to be punished every so often for random happenstance.

The lighthearted tone does prove to be portable, though, as it permeates the surprising number of extra minigames included with Alien Hominid. The PDA game (which includes a level editor, of all things) recalls the Super Game Boy Donkey Kong from 1994, and is nearly absorbing. Not nearly as fun but considerably more memorable is an Atari 2600-esque game where you steer a Soviet ICBM to an American city, especially with its "PWNED" victory screen. There are a handful of two-player party game variations on the basic Alien Hominid gameplay (e.g. a pinata game where players race to collect candy dropped by a boss), but none of these offer much variation on the much more absorbing cooperative play in the main campaign.

Alien Hominid can be approached as a Metal Slug or Gunstar Heroes clone, and, at the very least, SNK's seminal shooter series and Treasure's 16-bit classics were strong influences. Instead, it plays on the approachability of this gameplay formula to present to you an energetic indie cartoon that happens to also be a game. It isn't perfect; you'll need to accept the occasional cheap death and some rough edges. There just isn't anything like Alien Hominid, though.