It's common for computer game manufacturers to jump on the success of a hit science fiction franchise. Many adaptations have proven to be near-disasters, such as Independence Day and The Lawnmower Man, and only a small minority live up to the quality of their source material, such as LucasArts' TIE Fighter. The Arrival CD-ROM Adventure falls somewhere in the middle: It has some great elements, but is ultimately just a mediocre adventure game.
Beginning ten years after the end of the film, The Arrival puts the you in the role of Zane Ziminski, played by Charlie Sheen in the film. You have been captured by the aliens after discovering their base, hidden deep below the New Mexico desert. You awaken in a holding cell onboard the alien space station, and your goal is to thwart their plans for a second attempt to take over Earth (they're planning to inject a gas into the atmosphere to terraform Earth to their liking).
As with most PC adventure games, you navigate from a first-person perspective by clicking on the direction you wish to walk with a left-mouse click and by bringing up the inventory screen and options menu with a right click. To enter most rooms or to access certain computers, you must tackle brainteasers like those in 7th Guest or The Neverhood Chronicles. In fact, most gamers will recognize these "classic" puzzles: musical tone recognition, concentration-style pair matching, the triangle peg puzzle, a maze, etc. As in many adventure games, some tasks rely on your pixel-hunting skills. There are some pretty hard-to-find objects on the screen, and you won't stumble across them unless you carefully and slowly drag your mouse over the entire view until the hand icon closes.
The best aspect of The Arrival is its beautifully rendered 3-D graphics, containing well-drawn, high-resolution environments, with thousands of detailed sprites. In most hallways and larger rooms, the game also supports a 360-degree rotational view. Another impressive attribute, especially for this type of adventure game, is the nonlinear storyline. Depending on your decisions and the order you complete your actions the game will have one of several endings. It is possible, for example, to escape from the alien mothership unharmed, armed with evidence of the alien's plot, but still not be able to save the Earth. On the flip side, there are many ways to die, and there are some pretty cool sequences to watch (getting sucked into space, your head exploding because of pressure, and poisonous fumes suffocating you).
The main weakness is the audio track - or the lack thereof. The speech is painfully slow and very precisely enunciated, and the voice acting is terrible. There is no MIDI and very little CD-quality music, and sound effects are limited to a low computer generator hum or the sound of an elevator ride.
Credit goes to Live Entertainment for creating an adaptation in which the story serves as a supplement to the movie script instead of ripping it off. It's a competent debut that may appeal to the beginner-to-immediate adventure gamer, but the sound problems and the triteness of the puzzles prevent The Arrival from being a great game.
