Possibly the safest way to describe this game is an FPS in its simplest form. This is a good, old-fashioned shooter from start to finish, devoid of any tactics or strategy. This game captures the very essence of run-and-gun.

Alien Trilogy is based loosely around the science-fiction masterpieces also entitled Alien, and unless my vocabulary has gone haywire, the word "Trilogy" encapsulates the fact that this game focuses on the first three movies. Basically, this captures the events that occurred before the whole series collapsed on itself.

You play as an anonymous soldier sent in, alone, to fight a guerrilla war between you and a horde of increasingly ugly xenomorphs. The opening FMV demonstrates that much, and it's as typical a science-fiction beginning as any; you get briefed on the forthcoming mission, you are sent into the sector, and cue a dramatic fight scene where the rest of your squad get murdered by some angry aliens.

Alien Trilogy keeps storyline to a bare minimum so as not to interfere with the gameplay. In fact, the whole game is glued together by the backstory you'll receive just before a mission, where you're given the necessary information in your typical sci-fi drivel-speak.

And then, beneath this, there is the actual game. Alien Trilogy's learning curve does not exist, so right from the beginning you're thrown in pretty much headlong into an alien infestation. Controls are easy to master on the Saturn's pad, thankfully, because most of the action in this game is quite intense if you are playing on the Raging Terror difficulty. (The game's difficulty is divided into three renamed versions of Easy, Normal, and Hard; in that order, they are Acid Reign, Raging Terror, and Xenomania)

You begin with a simple 9mm pistol, fending off relatively harmless face huggers, but the game throws more volatile weapons your way in a short space of time; the shotgun, the flamethrower, the pulse rifle, and, finally, the Smart Gun. You'll uncover all of the weapons in the first chapter of the game (remember, this is a trilogy) and each of them are quite satisfying to use. Every time you blast an alien you're given an unmistakable shot of adrenaline that not many games of this type deliver on the Saturn.

You'll be firing upon your standard array of aliens, and you'll find most of the lifeforms from the films featured as targets. Face huggers, drones, security guards, Synthetic soldiers, you name it, they're in the game for you to shoot down. One thing I'll mention, though, if you're looking for challenging AI, you'll find none in this game, even if you take into account the game's age. (This is a decade ago we're talking here) Most enemies will randomly stand there firing at you, hoping that their shots will hit you. Most of the time, they'll follow you slowly, leaving you to set a hasty trap. Alien follow round corner. You blast them before they get to attack. You get it?

Another thing I'll slip in; this game also features enemies which conveniently stand next to explosive barrels and crates and some of them even like to stand still behind a barricade of these dangerous objects. A quick shot from your weakest gun, and they're up in flames.

Just to lower the game's rating a little bit more, I'll talk about the level design. Unfortunately, it isn't good. Most of the game is stuck together with meagre tiles and it's hamstrung by repetition, but it still manages to make these incessantly repeating sections quite exciting with a relentless spew of alien madness.

Once you get used to the mechanics of the game, you better hold on to that expertise, nevertheless. The first chapter is deceptively easy, but after that, you really do go through hell. The second and third chapters just keep building up more and more aliens, without making them any more intelligent - in the end you're just completely overwhelmed with an unwanted gathering of ugly xenomorphs, all lined up, in position to get a shotgun shell hammered through their face.

The thing I like most about this game, though, is not the shooting. It's the sense of exploration. Level design is, as aforementioned, limited and linear, but that doesn't matter. There's a bewildering amount of nooks and crannys in this game where you can find this one last alien. This feature is made better by the fact that at the end of every mission you're given a tally of how many aliens you killed, how many secrets you found, and how many mission objectives you completed successfully. In some later missions it's nigh on impossible to get 100% of all three the first time through, and the game encourages a welcome amount of replay value in this system.

Alien Trilogy certainly delivers quite a competent integration of gameplay mechanics, and it's a key example of the expression "sum of its parts". Every single feature in this game seamlessly blends together to make a good, solid shooter that anybody could enjoy, regardless of how much they love games or how much they hate them.

But a game could not be a game without the graphics and the sound to accompany the main course. The graphics in this game were decent for its time, but in contrast to the PlayStation version the Saturn incarnation pales. The enemies are passable, and so is the FMV sequence that introduces each of the three chapters, but the environments needed a little work to stop them looking so bland. Lighting is quite poor, too. The visuals suffice, but they're nothing special. Far from it.

The sound in this game is of quite a high standard. The enemy's cries are lame, but they can sure as hell surprise you - the music is atmospheric, and while it does get recycled as the game goes on, it's comprised of some superb tunes, ranging from haunting and ambient pieces to weird electronic sounds permeating a techno beat. What little voice-overs there are in the FMV sequences are mediocre, though, and whoever spoke those lines must be a robot.

In conclusion, Alien Trilogy is an enjoyable and competent FPS that anybody would be hard pressed to call poor. It has no set-pieces, but it's quite a long game, and with all the heaps of replay value you can find in Alien Trilogy, nobody with a Sega Saturn can really go wrong.