Thank you Ultimo Ratio Games for providing this game for review!

Alpha Response is a tactical first-person shooter most prominently developed by Minh “Gooseman” Le of Counter-Strike fame. Up to 4 players in co-op can drop into dense, urban areas inspired by real cities to take on missions requiring tactical police intervention such as hostage rescues, cash truck robberies, and bomb defusals. The name of the game is carefully approaching any mission, as enemies can quickly bring you down with the utmost efficacy. Your best path to victory is using cars or walls to your advantage and slowly dispatching enemies before moving forward.

Most missions act in waves, where you must clear out a location and get an objective done before a new wave starts and more enemies show up, continuing until either a timer is depleted or a larger goal is met, with each completed wave also letting you refill your health and ammo. You complete missions by eliminating criminals and pursuing objectives, which allows you to change your loadout before the next mission (if applicable) begins. Guns can be swapped out, attachments can be bought, and grenades can be equipped. After updating your loadout, you can either use a police car to drive to your next mission or hoof there on-foot. There are different ways of approaching missions, but they all boil down to the same premise: lock and load, and may your aim be true.

When you start a custom game, you’ll be given modifiers for the number of missions you must play before winning a game, such as the enemy amount, their damage, accuracy, and awareness, as well as your own damage and number of respawns. You can also disable specific enemy types, if you find certain enemies frustrating. The game supports up to 4-player co-op, but I never saw an open server in the browser, and the built-in matchmaking never found a game. If you’re a fan of wave shooters like Payday 2 then there’s definitely fun to be had here, but suffice it to say that unless you are playing this with your own groups of friends, you will be playing it alone.

Visually, Alpha Response aims to have realistic and authentic cityscapes and urban areas that (currently) are largely European. Both of its maps feature roads and sidewalks made of stone while angular, neo-gothic brick buildings line the streets and splashes of trees, bushes, and plants occupy the city. Guns are well-modeled and their animations are smooth, with great visual feedback as enemies explode with splatterings of blood with each shot. However, other aspects of the game can feel clunky and dated. The lighting is a bit extreme and washed out, lacking detail in places; environments can be detailed or slapdash, causing some models to feel out of place; NPCs look bizarre, and most character animations are a bit stiff; the UI is bland and cluttered, and there’s a general lack of cohesion in visual design. Missions are placed around the city so that you can walk or drive to them to give the city a connected feeling, but the repetitive usage of a handful of buildings in-between these more developed locations make it feel dull and abandoned.

Audio is similarly a bit mixed. Alpha Response has some good sounds on its guns, grenades, bullet impacts and explosions, but they’re mixed far too varyingly to be enjoyable. Some sounds are quiet and soft, while others are excessively loud and grate on the ears. The sound effects are not terrible on their own, but with the way the audio is being mixed, they overpower and overwhelm the player. It also has typical issues with the audio being physically rendered based on your head’s position, causing some bizarre positioning effects as your character moves around. And finally, voice acting is also of varying quality, and the variety of different microphones and voices you’ll hear thrown out from NPCs and enemies can take you out of the immersion.

In terms of controls, the game is, again, a bit varied. The bread and butter of an FPS is undoubtedly its gunplay, and I can confidently say that Alpha Response’s gunplay is pretty good. As a younger gamer, I played CS:GO and not the original Counter-Strike, where Gooseman first earned his fame. Gooseman’s style of tactical action was solidified even back then, and the DNA of that gameplay still lives on with Alpha Response. However, other systems in the game are less polished. Interactivity in general is a struggle as most hitboxes seem to be touchy, making it hard to pick up ammo or health, free hostages, and so on. Driving has floaty handling that shifts between too heavy and too light depending on your speed. Movement in general can feel clunky, and some physics interactions like disarming bombs don’t feel as responsive as they could.

Earlier reviews on Steam and by others mentioned that performance was quite poor, but playing the game now after several patches, I’ve found that performance is overall okay. I get good performance on my 5070 Ti, and I’d describe the game as playable on my Radeon Vega 8 laptop. I’d hope performance can be further optimized, but with the promise of ray-tracing being added in the future, this might not occur. You will likely encounter bugs as you play, but on the game’s community Discord Gooseman actively responds to bug reports and tracks them down as they’re identified, so I believe most of these will be quickly identified and stamped out, but there's only so much a small set of players can find.

Morally, Alpha Response features intense violence with realistic blood that splatters and pools. Enemies flip backwards or explode through the air as you shoot them in comically graphic fashion, with some guns blowing body parts off. Characters can also use severe language like f--k, d--m, s--t, and so on.

Finally, I wanted to note something. While I was glancing at the Steam reviews, I noticed something a bit odd. There were many users who reviewed it positively with nearly 200 or more hours in the game. I initially assumed these were just die-hard fans of tactical shooters, as many do follow Gooseman for these types of games. However, looking closer at the accounts, they all played similar games for similar amounts of time, shared similar Steam groups between them, and had reviewed very few games. Steam curator “Games with Paid Reviews” commented on these reviews by suggesting they were illegitimate positive reviews. CCG takes no position on this but did think it was worth mentioning.

Overall, Alpha Response is a fun game in the vein of Payday 2 and Gooseman’s earlier games like Tactical Intervention and Counter-Strike. There is a good foundation hamstrung by presentation issues, bugs, and a lack of polish, but my hope is with time these may be ironed out. It’s obvious this is a passion project mostly done by Gooseman, and as such is being built on a limited budget and should be approached as such. If you enjoy these types of games, you can probably find a fair bit of fun for the entry cost. However, if you’re not able to tolerate jank and rough edges, don't think you'd have much fun playing on your own, or just don’t enjoy this type of game, I’d hold off until it receives necessary polishing.