Area 51 E3 2004 Preshow Hands-On Impressions

Area 51 was a 1995 arcade game that put you in the role of an alien-blasting member of a team called STARR, but the storyline was pretty much irrelevant. The game was a light-gun game, so it rightfully focused more on smoking aliens with a big orange pistol than any sort of meaningful story. Now, almost a decade later, Midway is preparing to release another game with the Area 51 name, trading in the big, dopey pistol for standard first-person shooter controls, online gameplay, and an actual storyline.

Area 51 puts you in the role of an operative on a hazardous-materials team. Communication with the secret military base, the infamous Area 51, has gone dead, and you're sent in to investigate. What you find is a collection of surviving scientists and an array of enemies in the "alien" and "mutant" categories. What we've played of the game seems to go pretty heavy on the scripted events and squadlike artificial intelligence. You'll often be fighting alongside other members of your hazmat team or other allies stuck deep within the base.

A big part of any first-person shooter's appeal is its weapon set. Area 51 contains a pretty standard set of conventional weapons, so you can expect to see a shotgun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle with multiple zoom settings, a Desert Eagle-like pistol, and more. The game will also contain some alien weaponry and two types of grenades.

At some point in the game, you'll also be able to mutate at will into a couple of different forms. One form will give you very powerful melee attacks. Another will give you parasitic projectiles that you can use to restore your health. Staying in your mutated forms requires you to have mutagen, which can be picked up from dead mutants, among other places. The idea behind the game's design is to force you to make use of all of the powers and items at your disposal. So some areas will be tackled more easily in human form, using conventional weaponry, while others will be focused more on mutation.

Graphically, the game has a pretty sharp look to it on both the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. The game makes good use of blurring effects, particularly when you're getting hit. There are also some nice little touches already in the game, such as the way the background distorts properly if you're looking at things through large glass tubes, which appear in some of the game's laboratory sequences.

Area 51 controls roughly how you'd expect a first-person shooter to control, though the addition of things like mutation, as well as little accessories like flashlights and the like, means that you'll have to use the D pad to toggle some things on and off. From what we've seen so far, the game controls pretty well.

On the multiplayer side of things, expect to see a few standard modes, like deathmatch and capture the flag. Mutation is expected to figure heavily into the way the multiplayer game plays, so that could spice things up quite a bit. Other options are still on the drawing board, but there should be at least a couple more modes put into the game before it's released. The game will support up to eight players on both the PS2 and Xbox.

Area 51 is scheduled to be released in late 2004. We'll have more on the game as it becomes available.