QualityApeMan's Review of Alien 3

Alien 3

First Released October 1992
unreleased

SNES
C64
GB
GEN
GG
NES
SMS
AMI

Better game than the movie?

User Rating: 7.5 | Alien 3 SNES

By QualityApeMan | Review Date: September 27, 2008

I had this when I was a child. It was one of the first SNES games I had. I decided to play it again to see whether the game was as good as I remember, or whether it was my naive age that made me think it a classic. I was soon to find out. Firstly, the plot loosely follows that of the movie. Ripley has crash-landed on the prison planet following the end of the movie Aliens and unlike the movie, Ripley has to do various missions to advance the levels and defeat the Queen Alien at the end of the game. The main difference between the film and game is that in the film there was a single alien running around the planet, while in the game the place is crawling with them. Ripley has her somewhat customised pulse rifle/grenade launcher/flamethrower weapon as seen in Aliens. This is your sole weapon in the game, and ammunition is scattered around the levels waiting to be collected as you progress (and trust me, towards the end you WILL need it). The graphics in this game are quite nicely done for a game of its time, with nicely designed atmospheric backgrounds and very nice character sprites and animation. The sound is what makes this game so special. The SFX are just fine, with various alien screeches and gun noises, but it is the music that overwhelms you as you play. The pseudo-orchestral soundtrack fits the game perfectly and fills you with vigour as you battle the alien hoardes. It has one of the bext soundtracks of a game of that time. Now, sadly, I have to move onto the main negative point of the game. The game starts of with a variety of mission types like saving prisoners, welding doors, and destroying eggs. All this is good and provides variation BUT only for the first few levels. It gets quite boring running back and forth doing the same things every level to advance, and I found myself stopping playing for a while incase I became insane. Even great graphics and sound can scarcely rescue a game that does this to a person. Lastability-wise, as i previously mentioned the game gets quite hard towards the end with the ammo running out quickly as the aliens become harder to kill. Luckily there is a password system so you can save your progress!

Overview:
Graphics - Great sprite design & animation. Nicely backgrounds too.
Sound - Nice SFX, but AMAZING, involving music
Gameplay - Starts off like a great game, but can quickly become boring and frustrating as the missions repeat and the aliens get very strong.
Lastability - The game is very hard towards the end, but a password system will help you keep your place.

Alien 3

Better game than the movie?

One of the best side-scrolling adventure games for the SNES.

One of the forerunners of the Survival Horror genre!