This game combines some of the very best aspects of such games as Quake III and Unreal Tournament and wraps them up with a retro alien theme, while adding tons of original ideas to make the game quite unique.

The goal of Alien Arena was to create the perfect marriage between Quake and Unreal Tournament, between retro sci-fi and futuristic tech, and between casual gamer and advanced expert, and wrap it up in a package with quality that could rival that of commercial games. The game has a weapon set that is unique and fun, and deviates a bit away from the standard Q3 or UT2k4 weapons. Gameplay can be altered easily in the menu by choosing between the various game types, such as Deathmatch, Team Core Assault, All Out Assault, Capture the Flag, Duel, and Cattle Prod. Users can also apply a number of different mutators to the game rules as well, creating some pretty interesting scenarios.

Using the CRX engine, which is based on the Id GPL source code, Alien Arena includes modern effects such as real time per-pixel lighting and shadows, lensflares, light blooms, reflective water, textured particles, stainmaps, 32 bit color, shaders, fog, weather effects, and much more. The engine has been optimized with each release, and will run very nicely even on older hardware.