Alien Trilogy

"I should've known better."

I know surprisingly many people who played Alien 3 on the Super Nintendo - it must have been a pretty popular game in its time. Of all of them, however, I seem to be the only one with enough patience to actually finish the tedious run 'n' gun platformer in question. In hindsight, I should've known better than to get my hopes up ever again for a game developed by Probe/Acclaim, but I was sincerely expecting the new platform to give way to suitably advanced gameplay concepts. Instead, even the once-solid graphics went down the pan.

Essentially, Alien Trilogy is a failed Doom clone. I'm sorry if I spoilt the rest of the review for you, but I want to get the message across loud and clear. Released in 1996, a good two years after Doom, Alien Trilogy fails - quite colossally, in fact - to improve on a single feature of the game it so obviously takes after. This alone speaks for the competence of the developers, but had they had the wisdom not to meddle with the Doom's winning formula too much, they could've still produced a decent first-person shooter. Predictably, however, Acclaim chose to stay true to their tried and tested practice of licence wasting that only Ocean could've ever hoped to match, and unleashed this train wreck upon the suspecting, but still hopeful public.

Honestly, the gameplay in Alien Trilogy feels as if the developers had a check-list of annoying features to implement. The annoyances start even before the actual game itself, in the options menu, which is certainly a feat unto itself. The controls aren't properly customisable - a dead give-away for programmers' laziness - and of the four preset controller configurations available, only one actually makes any sense while none allow simultaneous strafing and running, allocating both functions to shoulder buttons exclusively. The difficulty levels are standard Acclaim fare where "easy" actually means "trivial" and "hard" translates into the classic "impossible, with respawn", so there's essentially only one to choose from. There is, however, the option to format the memory card, which is a handy tool for getting rid of those dead blocks. Some redeeming feature, eh?

The first thing to hit you once playing the game is that something doesn't feel quite right. It takes a while to identify all the factors contributing to this uneasiness, but the feeling is unmistakeable right form the start, with both the enemies and the environment contributing towards it. The worst offender is probably the gap between the moment a weapon is fired and the visual indication that the enemy was or wasn't hit. There is always a tenth of a second's worth of delay and since most of the enemies are rather quick, a lot of ammo goes to waste and cheap hits abound. I would imagine this isn't intentional and that it's the game engine that is to blame, but getting rid of the gap really should've been the number one priority for the developers; even sacrificing the look up/down feature, which is of limited use anyway due to fixed aim, would've been worth it. I was also disappointed that unlike Doom, Alien Trilogy doesn't simulate even the most basic ballistics - this way, the shotgun doesn't have the spread effect, for instance, which makes one wonder just what the developers were concentrating on...

...as it certainly wasn't fast-paced, action oriented gameplay. Instead of delivering course after course of various tastes of cannon fodder with the occasional side of smart and dangerous enemies like, again, in Doom, the developers chose to keep the player busy primarily with swarms of relatively harmless enemies that are, however, annoyingly difficult to hit both due to their size and speed. Larger enemies have their own twist to them: they mostly attack from the side or back, which wouldn't be much of a problem if the player could either outrun or outmanoeuvre them. But with the aforementioned run/strafe handicap and the fact that the levels are seemingly intentionally designed for the player to get stuck into the scenery as often as possible, he is essentially powerless against their attack patterns.

Just to make sure that the game proves no fun at all, however, even killing the aliens is not without its consequences for the player. A pool of toxic acid forms on the floor each time an alien is blown to bits, reducing the player's health by a percentage point on contact. This feature does keep the game true to the licence but somebody at Acclaim should've realised at one point that it doesn't really work in the context of the game. The movies were, after all, "tactical shooters", and for all its endless corridors full of various obstacles, that would've probably made more sense for Alien Trilogy, too. As it is, the level design is strictly perfunctory and only marginally more advanced than in Wolfenstein 3D - but all the more monotonous.

Unlike Alien 3, Alien Trilogy disappoints in the graphics and sound departments, as well. If 3D environments are done with some taste and the CGI movies used to convey the story are of considerable quality, the 2D sprites are simply horrendous. The aliens are just plain ugly and so stiff that they don't even come across as living creatures. The aliens' animations, for instance, skip so many frames that especially the faster ones appear to be teleporting across the floor rather than actually moving in a continuous manner. Compared to Doom, both the resolution and the colour palette of the sprites also appear inferior. Apart from providing reasonably believable atmosphere, the sound effects indicate only basic alien presence, but they are not nearly as informative as in Doom.

Alien Trilogy is an utter disappointment of a game. Had Acclaim simply licensed the PlayStation Doom engine from Id, they could've had a decent game on their hands. They unwisely chose to go it alone, however, and took two steps back instead of the one forward. I'd love to see the Alien franchise done justice on a home console and now that Acclaim is finally defunct, I might even live to see the day.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/06