Alien Resurrection

"Watch out, Facehuggers! AAAAARRRGHH!!!"

Alien Ressurection is a game based off the awesome movie Alien Ressurection. Now, I'm sure you have noticed movie-based games always seem to blow. Well, that's not the case here. Alien Ressurection is, in fact, a very good game!

Story: Well...the game really doesn't go into the story much at all. You are basically supposed to run around about 8 or 9 levels destroying clones, and you gotta make it to the Betty to escape the USM Auriga, the massive spaceship that the game takes place on. In order to truely understand why aliens have gotten loose and taken over the ship, who the characters are, and why Ellen Ripley, the main character, who has been ressurected 200 years after her death by raw DNA samples, has such a grudge against the clones and aliens, you gotta see the movie.

Graphics: The graphics are actually pretty good. The CG cutscenes are nicely done. In-game, there is a lot of pixelation, but it's PS1 so that's forgivable. The aliens themselves look pretty realistic I think.

Sound: Um...You got the fireing of guns. The aliens screaming when you shoot them. The sound of the USM Auriga slowly falling apart throughout the game. The beeping of you motion tracker when an enemy is nearby. That's pretty much it. This game has no music, but that actually helps it's atmosphere.

Gameplay: For the majority of the game, you play Ellen Ripley. There are three other characters, Call, Distepheno, and Christie(Who oddly enough is a guy), and they each have 1 mission in the game. In-game, you shoot aliens, find keycards to open new areas, activate switches, and turn valves. Now, onto the combat, and the reason this game didn't get a 10: It is EXTREMELY difficult, even on the easy setting. First-timers will find themselves constantly running out of ammo and not knowing what to do. This problem disappears after a few playthroughs, though. In order to master this game and conserve ammo, you gotta know when to use your shotgun/pulse rifle/etc, and when to use your pistol. It's extremely weak, but has unlimited ammo. Another reason this game is difficult is because of the savepoint locations. Each level has about 4 savepoints, and they are spread very, very far apart. So you hit that switch, ran through a few passages, killed some aliens, dodged the steam, ran into a blockade of some sort, backtracted and found a way to bypass it, then repeated the same thing for about 20 minutes. Then you find yourself low on health with no medkits, and right when you least expect it an alien leaps out from around a corner and instantly kills you, forcing you to replay the last 30 minutes of your game, all because of the severe distance between savepoints. One other thing: This isn't really a problem, but there are these little scorpion-like aliens called Facehuggers which will leap up onto your face eat their way into, down into your chest. Here, they grow into a Chestbuster, and will bust out of you and kill you in about 1 minute. You gotta use a Portable Autodode Kit to kill them before time is up, and fortunatly there are plenty of these.

All in all, it's a pretty good game with cool weapons, but it loses points for the rarity of savepoints and the overal difficulty of the game. An 8/10.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/26/06