The self-proclaiming ‘black death, white-knuckle nightmare’ is looking incredibly dated 11 years on…
So, yes, it is an early Psone release, and yes, has seen a decade whip past since it’s release, but one can’t help but feel even those significant numbers and facts do not excuse how incredibly old and archaic the game both looks and feels. 1996 saw the release of the likes of Super Mario 64, and whilst admittedly that was a revolutionary title in every respect, I do strongly recall playing Alien Trilogy for the first time and even then being particularly under whelmed with what was on offer.
First, the technical side of things. The developers commitment to remaining accurate to the classic alien designs of the movies is admirable, and the numerous alien enemies throughout do look like faithful recreations, but are severely hindered by the titles technical shortcomings – having very low polygon counts, and each ‘gene’ of Alien featuring a very limited number of simplistic animations. You’ll find no alien drones leaping down from the ceiling at you, no ‘dog’ aliens (modelled after the creature from Alien 3) leaping about the place – instead each one generally scuttles towards you before commencing with the same repeated, simple biting or goring animations.
Maybe this sounds like expecting too much from such an early Psone release of all things, but these are not random opponents flung on screen in a game where combat isn’t the main focus – these are the titular menaces, infamous silver screen creations who in the films at least, are fast, vicious, and at times, even cunning lethal adversaries. Here, they are generally floor-bound (no wall/ceiling climbing here thank you very much) and the only sense of danger they do instil is due to the sheer chunk of health they can knock off of your character with their basic clawing (though some of the special death animations are a guilty pleasure to watch). It’s all very primal stuff, and really not befitting of the iconic, swift predators that we see in the films.
So what of the rest of the gameplay? Well, when you’re not taking out the titular foes, or the various human opponents (who are equally monotonous in their execution), you’ll generally be wandering around looking for certain items or switches to open particular doors or passageways. Whilst this is, of course, the norm for most pre-half-life first person shooters in particular, in Alien Trilogy it is made almost tediously unbearable due to the mind-numbing repetition of not only the goals (find the 3 switches to open the main exit for the level) but also the environments. Again, kudos to the design team for remaining so faithful to the films, and each of the 3 ‘zones’ which the game is comprised of are fairly different, but after a short while the drab environs and heavily repeated locales become particularly uninspiring. There are the odd injections of originality or variety in terms of level design and layout, but the game as a whole becomes incredibly repetitive. The basic process equals something akin to ‘press lots of switches to open lots of doors… take down the same aliens over and over… kill the alien queen’. Once you’ve gone through this whole process, you’re required to do it all over again, not once, but twice! By the time I’d taken down the second Alien Queen I remember having all but given up hope, particularly when the games idea of increasing the challenge is just by throwing more enemies and more switches your way.
As is the norm with the genre, you end up eventually owning a veritable arsenal of weapons to take down your opponent, and in fairness, the weapons aren’t the worst selection possible, but neither are they particularly original or inventive. In fact, it’s easy to summarise the whole weapon area of the game as ‘FPS inventory 101’. You’ll get your handgun, then not long after a shotgun, a couple of grenades, then eventually more powerful automatics, pulse rifles etc.
In conclusion, Alien Trilogy really has not aged well at all, and I believe that’s mostly due to the fact that it wasn’t exactly a sprightly spring chicken in the first place. Whilst the developers certainly put a lot of time in remaining faithful to the look and feel of the movies (I would be lying if I said there wasn’t considerable atmosphere to some of the later levels in particular), it does feel very much like they had it all planned out in terms of look and feel, but when it came to the process of actually moulding it all into an enjoyable, well-paced videogame, they must have all been busy fending off chest-bursters, or laughing at how awful alien resurrection was shaping up to be.
Yes, it's old, but that's no excuse... if you're really harbouring for an old-school FPS from this era of videogaming, then most definitely seek out a copy of Doom instead... and that applies to all you Alien fans as well!