Alien Trilogy

"Bland, repetitive and lazy, but not entirely worthless."

This was actually the first PlayStation game I ever played, so I have to squint through layers of nostalgia to give a fair review.

Simply put, the game is adequate, but badly-made and dull. When reviewing a game this old, it's probably best to start by getting the things that time hurts the most out of the way.

The graphics are poor overall. The backgrounds look alright, in an ordinary way (the Giger-esque Boneship has inspired moments), but the enemy graphics are terrible. They've used 2D sprites, which is a good choice given the hardware, but unfortunately they've used very ugly 2D sprites. Like many games of the 90s, characters have been modelled and posed in 3D, then still shots taken and lazily converted into sprites. As a result, animations are awkward and choppy, characters are blurry, washed-out and undefined, and everything looks very, very flat. The aliens also have bright green blood for some strange reason, rather than the muddy yellow we're all used to. And eggs are pink. And dog aliens are bright red.

The sounds fare a bit better - all the aliens make sounds taken from the movies, though for some reason they're not the signature squeals and screeches most of us think of; they're mostly wheezes and gasps. They do the job. Guns and explosions are a bit muffled, but not awful. There's a nice atmospheric soundtrack behind everything, though it's very simplistic and often sounds like the guy is playing around with keyboard presets.

Okay, now on to the gameplay - it's about as simple as can be. Walk forward, kill an alien, walk forward, kill an alien, turn a corner, kill an alien, find a battery, use it on a door, exit level. I have nothing against simplicity (most of my favourite games are dumb like this), but the basic gameplay just isn't fun. There are different types of alien, but they all do the same thing: slowly zig-zag towards you and slap you, inflicting very little damage. No exaggeration; every single enemy (including the bosses) uses this method, aside from the facehugger, who uses this method and occasionally climbs onto your face, inflicting very little damage. There are human enemies too, but they're even less threatening, mostly because the bullets they fire will almost never hit you. Again, it'll sound like I'm exaggerating here, but I'm totally serious: if someone shoots at you from across a room, it will take about two seconds for the bullets to reach you, inflicting very little damage. Even if you're not trying to avoid them, you will avoid them.

The overall feel of the game is one of rushed laziness. Once you've played the first few levels, you've basically played the whole game. Nothing interesting ever happens, and nothing tries to - for instance, the final boss battle is exactly the same as the first and second. Oh, except that you have much better weapons. It was a cakewalk the first time around, and the final time it's a... cakerun? It's very easy, anyway.

Which more or less sums up the entire game, actually. Aside from the two levels prior to the final battle, there's no real challenge to be found anywhere. In the early levels, you may lose a bit of health while coming to grips with the controls, and there's a good chance you'll start to run low on ammo, but after a while you'll end up with a huge (HUGE) supply of bullets, health and armour, and there'll just be nothing that can stop you. There's a Hard mode available, which I haven't tried, but recommend nevertheless.

I mentioned the controls, and yeah - coming to grips with them can take a while, as they're very laggy. Most presses of the D-pad take a good amount of time to register, though eventually you'll adjust.

The storyline is best ignored entirely, since even the game can't decide what it is - the intro sequence has a Company man talking to Burke (from Aliens) about sneaking alien samples off the planet LV-426, and keeping Ripley in the dark about this. Burke and Ripley then travel to the planet with a bunch of marines, who all get killed, leaving Ripley on her own. From now on, Ripley for some reason follows orders from the Company, all of which involve eliminating the aliens and preventing their leaving the planet. The Company is also completely open with her about their aborted attempts to smuggle out aliens. As if this wasn't confusing enough, in-game cutscenes show Ripley with the android Bishop (from Aliens), who also (spoiler warning) manages to get facehugged at one point, which is ridiculous. Trying to make sense of any of this would probably be a mistake.

So yeah, unless you find it really cheap, I wouldn't recommend this too heartily, even if you're an avid Alien fan... actually, given the surreal butchery of the source material, *especially* if you're an Alien fan (did I mention that the game moves the Fiorina-161 prison to LV-426?). But it's not terrible.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/05/07