Timed clickfest intruding on a nice recreation of the Aliens universe.

User Rating: 5.8 | Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure PC
If you ever encountered a Dark Horse Aliens franchise comic book you will have a very good idea what this adventure is about. Quite simply it is yet another rehash of the less than novel "tough spacers examine oh so innocent looking mining colony distress signal only to end up in a sinister xenomorph experiment featuring mad scientist gone awry" approach. This means that the characters and settings will have a noticeable comic over-the-top feel about them. Simplistic and even outright juvenile dialogue, shallow portraits and seen it before environments.

The game begins onboard the spaceship Sheridan, where you move around making preparations for landing, it's main purpose being to define the characters. From here on the base exploration mission begins, which is more of a traditional point and click adventure, going from room to room and solving puzzles along the way.

You will gain access to a few rooms at a time, solving sometimes rather obscure item combination puzzles to gain access to new areas. You will not return to areas that have been completed, so if you forgot to bring some useful item along, tough luck. The most unusual part about the exploration is that you are being timed. If you linger too long you will be warned by a few cutscenes of alien creatures tearing down barricades not seen in the actual game. Take too long and you will be automatically killed.

There are also a handful of fights along the way, where the game shifts to a small isometric arena. The lack of details or options in these battles make them both rather easy and dull, failing to build any tension. The graphics of the main part of the game are really good though, with some nice cinematic effects when going between rooms. Cryo did succeed in capturing the eerie feeling of the Dark Horse Aliens universe, but the gameplay itself is merely a shallow excuse to tell a bland story. This one is for the Aliens fans only.