Alien Resurrection

"What a waste."

Good things do not always come to those who wait, and Alien Resurrection is a case in point. I was excited about this title when I first heard about it way back in 1997. Originally, this game was supposed to be a 3D adventure title somewhere along the lines of Tomb Raider or Resident Evil, but at some point during its extremely long production period it turned into a first-person shooter like it’s PSX predecessor, Alien Trilogy. Three long years after it’s announcement (and the movie’s run in the theaters), Fox Interactive’s Alien Resurrection for Playstation staggered into stores. I held out hope that this would turn out to be at least somewhat enjoyable, but apparently that was too much to ask. Alien Resurrection is a disappointing mess.

The game actually starts out with an excellent, and gory, CG intro movie. Ripley has been cloned in order to revive the alien species for “scientific” research, and things have naturally gone horribly wrong. The aliens have taken over the spaceship, and Ripley, with a little help from her friends (Call, Christie, and Distephano each have one level), set out to stop the aliens once again. The game follows the plot of the movie rather loosely through its 10 levels. Some mission objectives such as destroying clones and unlocking docking clamps really just serve as reasons for roaming corridors and blasting aliens.

The biggest problem with Alien Resurrection is the control setup, which is so incredibly awful it boggles the mind. With the Dual Shock controller, the left analog stick is used for moving Ripley around, and the right stick is used for turning and aiming your weapon. That right there is enough to make the control a major headache; I simply don’t know why you can’t handle strafing with one pair of the trigger buttons as in many other PSX first-person shooters. Oh, wait, the reason for that is because the designers decided it would be a good idea to use every single other button on the controller for other things, some of which just seems ridiculously unnecessary for this sort of game. Ripley doesn’t use items that she finds automatically, so there are buttons for cycling through items and using them. There’s also a crouch button, a reload button, a 180° turn button, and an aim-centering button. You’ve got all this junk, yet there’s no run button, meaning that this a rather slow-moving adventure. If you don’t have a Dual Shock controller, then you’re in real trouble, because the actions of the right stick have to be performed by pressing a button and d-pad. It’s pretty hopeless either way, and there’s no option for changing the setup.

The horrendous control contributes to another major hangup I have with this game: Alien Resurrection is an insanely, frustratingly difficult game. I’m all for a good challenge, but the deck is seriously stacked against you here, even on the Easy difficulty setting. Since the control is so awkward and convoluted, things that should be relatively simple, such as aiming your weapon, become an absolute nightmare every time you face an enemy. It would have been nice if the designers had made the hit detection a little more generous, in order to counteract this somewhat, but they chose to make it particularly unforgiving. Also, the aliens are much faster than you are, and they love zig-zagging all over the place when they attack you, making every single fight a stiff challenge. Another annoyance is that the bigger aliens have this nasty habit of running right through you and attacking your backside. That’s just got to be some sort of glitch, so backing up before that happens is advisable. Really, every enemy in the game has a legitimate shot at taking you down in a hurry if you aren’t careful.

The designers did add one extra element of challenge that makes good sense to me, though it could have been implemented better. In Alien Trilogy, those lovely face-huggers would attach themselves to you, do a little damage, and then be on their merry way; of course, that’s not how things worked in the movies. For Alien Resurrection, once a face-hugger gets ahold of you, you black out momentarily, and upon waking up, there’s a timer that appears to tell you how long you have before a newborn alien explodes from your chest and it’s game over, man. The only hope for you is the portable autodoc, a medical device that irradiates unhatched aliens, saving your bacon. This is a neat way to add some authenticity (if that’s the right word) to the game, but it would have been nice if the aliens would have stopped attacking you after you were impregnated with one of their own. True, you can’t be face-hugged again while impregnated, but face-huggers will still attack you with their tails. It’s like they just want to rub it in. Another thing to note is that you can’t proceed through some doors while impregnated, so if there isn’t an autodoc in the vicinity, and you don’t have anymore on you, you’re finished. I’m pretty sure that these doors exist solely to hide loading times, so there’s some design issue here that couldn’t be resolved.

The 10 levels in Alien Resurrection are very large, but they could have been designed better. Save locations tend to be very far apart, and since the game is so incredibly hard, getting from one to the next can take numerous tries. I also wasn’t too crazy about the game’s use of ladders, which are all over the place. Just getting on and off one can be tough, and missteps can result in long falls that will hurt you. Some levels feature areas that I don’t normally associate with first-person shooters: crawlspaces and underwater areas. The crawlspaces are a neat idea, and it can be very unnerving to have to enter one from which you just saw a face-hugger emerge, but they’re really easy to get lost in. As for the underwater portions, I really could have done without them in this game; the control is bad enough without having to deal with swimming. It would also have been nice if there was some sort of mapping system in this game, but you don’t even get a compass.

So, does Alien Resurrection do anything right? Well, I have to give it a lot of credit for its ability to create a tense atmosphere. This is one very scary game, rivaling the Resident Evil games for terror. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it survival horror, since you really don’t much of a chance to survive it for very long. Anyway, this game is very dark, which is perfect for setting a mood, if not for actually playing a game. Before you get to the title screen, the game gives you a message recommending that you play the game in the dark. At first I thought this was some lame attempt to make the game seem scarier than it was, but after I tried playing the game, I realized that it just wasn’t practical to have any external light sources, because they make seeing what’s going on impossible. You can adjust the brightness of your TV, but there’s only so much you can do. The only in-game help you get is with a crummy flashlight that has be recharged every few seconds, and I found myself just sitting around waiting for it to recharge before proceeding way too often. To be nice, what I did actually see looked very impressive, and the framerate is very solid. It did seem like some of the aliens were missing a few frames of animation, though.

Also contributing to the game’s spooky atmosphere is the manner in which the aliens attack you. Most of the time, they simply come out of nowhere and pounce on you. This is creepy, but it gets fairly predictable after a while. It isn’t long before you will come upon a switch and say to yourself, “OK, as soon as I hit this, a couple of aliens are going to come flying into the room from the corridor that was completely vacant two seconds ago.” And you’ll be right. Hey, I was scared the first few times it happened, but the trick got old pretty fast.

What really gives Alien Resurrection its scary mood is the sound, which is easily the best part of the game, even though there isn’t one note of in-game music to be heard. I honestly can’t remember a PSX game with as little music in it as this one; all it’s got is one rather minimalistic blurb for the intro and title screen. The sound effects and voice acting carry the soundtrack, providing a terrific background for the action and inaction. You will often hear the sounds of marines fighting (and losing to) aliens in the next room, and when you get there, all is silent, and dead bodies can be found littered about. Often there are sounds of hollering marines and screaming aliens in the background, and you simply can’t tell where they originate, which is all the more unsettling. Another big contributor is the ship’s computer, which is always chiming in with information, some of it very bad news, in its calm, impartial way. It’s an effective contrast to the mayhem going on around you. Of course, there are the aliens themselves, and they also sound terrific, from the scuttling of the face-huggers to the shrieks of the adult aliens. The sound in Alien Resurrection really is excellent; it’s just a shame they’ve been wasted on such a wretched game.

Alien Resurrection left a fairly bitter taste in my mouth, especially since I enjoyed Alien Trilogy as much as I did. It provides a few thrills and scares, but there isn’t much in the way of fun in this package. This is one case where the game company should have left its product in the production limbo it had been stuck in forever. Any money spent on this game is too much.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/19/01, Updated 02/19/01