Alien Trilogy

"All three movies rolled into one"

Alien Trilogy is another game based upon a movie or rather three movies Alien, Aliens and Alien3. It doesn't copy the movies directly however with the first 10 levels taking place in the same location as Aliens, the middle 10 levels taking place within a prison that looks similar to Alien3 and the last 10 levels within the Alien ship.

The Story
In this game you play as Ripley from the alien films and her goal in the game is to look to see if there are any survivors left on the planet and to eliminate the alien species. It's not a very deep plot but what did you expect Romeo and Juliet?

Graphics

The Graphic are not very good all the enemies look like cardboard cutouts and the guns look nothing at all like they do in the movies. There is a lot of detail in the surroundings though despite it looking very flat. The game is very fast though and can have lots of enemies on the screen at once without a huge amount of slow down slowdown.

Sound

The sound is very good and really adds to the atmosphere. The music being played really suits the style of game and you can even listen to it in your CD player. The sound effects are also effective in providing atmosphere especially the radar when there are approaching aliens. The guns all sound like they do in the movies in fact i wouldn't be surprised if they took the sounds directly from the films.

Gameplay

This game while not mentally challenging it is still fun to go around killing the aliens in this game. In fact there isn't a huge amount of different types of enemies in this game you have the facehuggers, soldier aliens, dog aliens, the queen alien and the humans from the company. I got up bit actually got a bit annoyed over the fact that all of the bosses are exactly the same they are all queens.

The game gets quite hard especially on the xenomorph difficulty setting and running out of ammo while facing more than one alien means a guaranteed death. The weapons in this game are a pistol, shotgun, flamethrower, pulse rifle (which doubles as a rocket launcher), smartgun and grenades.

Lifespan

With only 30 levels this game is not an epic quest like Final Fantasy but after you finish it you can always go back and play it on a higher difficulty level. Unfortunately there's no multi player which is a shame and would have given me much more to do with this game. Well i guess you and a friend could just take it in turns at levels to see who gets the higher ranking.

Some Gripes

Now here are some problems i have with this game. First is the fact that you can't jump this would have to be the first FPS i have played where you can't do this. Second is that there are no checkpoints within levels so if you get very far in a level and you die you'll have to start the whole level again.

Overall

Overall it pales in comparison to some of the next generation FPS and does have it's fare share of problems. It is still a fun game to take out and play every now and again.

Buy or Rent?

Well it is super cheap now because of how old it is so you could probably buy it brand new for $5 which isn't bad seeing as it's probably about the same price to rent it for a week.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/25/03, Updated 06/25/03