Retro-Spective: Alien Trilogy(Playstation 1 (Version played), PC, Sega Saturn. 1996)

I’ve got a confession to make. One of the reasons I started to do these Retro Reviews is like the (not often used) ‘From the Vault’ horror reviews I’ve done. Because doing it lets me write really positively about things that have made a little corner of my life a lot of fun at one time or another.

Enter Alien Trilogy on the good ol’ Playstation 1. I friggin’ love the Aliens franchise. I love all of the movies, even Prometheus, AVP and Alien Resurrection. So any game based on the franchise is definitely going to be wandering through my motion tracker if it’s coming out on any of my machines. Alien Trilogy is one such game, and it’s a corker! A pants-wettingly tense, intermittently balls-terrifying one, but a corker all the same.

One of the later sprite-based FPS games, Alien Trilogy uses pixel graphics for enemies and 3D environments to recreate the claustrophobia of the movie series. It works really well. One of the things I really feel the PS1 had going for it, and I feel a lot of developers also noted this, was that the actual shortcomings of the system enabled clever developers to use things like a relatively short draw distance, or a kind of lo-fi quality to the 3D to instil creepiness, uncertainty and tension into games. Looking at the system’s back catalogue, I feel that ability to instil spookiness out of that graphical shortcoming is a big reason the system has so many excellent horror titles.

Alien Trilogy excellently uses the PS1’s lo-fi 3D aesthetics to creep you out over and over. A short-ish draw distance makes your motion tracker very important, as you will hear and catch enemies on radar before they lurch into view, and it’s a disturbing, tense game of cat and mouse to try and make your escape strategies up on the fly based on your radar information, and even as they appear, the Aliens are intentionally designed as dark sprites who can easily disguise themselves within incidental scenery. Developers Probe were by this point veterans of the games dev industry and they use all their tricks learnt since the 8 bit generation to make this one of their best titles.

Much like their other stellar titles like The Terminator or the Mortal Kombat console ports, Alien Trilogy taps that characteristic Probe toughness, and this game presents a stiff challenge to any gamer. Perhaps too stiff for some but I will get back to that later on. The game offers a huge 30-strong set of levels which will easily last all but the most extreme gamer several weeks worth of concerted play. Enemies both human and alien do realistic damage so the player is kept on their toes throughout, as any slip up can result in being torn to shreds, turned into an incubator or riding a flamethrower burst all the way to hell. Despite this the game is fair and relatively kind, understanding that the high damage enemies do needs to be balanced out with a generous smattering of health and ammunition supplies. Also as a side note, it is a nice (if slightly out-of-cannon) addition that if you’re attacked by a face-hugger you just lose a bit of health (and are treated to it filling your entire TV screen which is quite offputting lol). It’s not an instantaneous cheap-shot death like the later Alien vs Predator titles on PC, which is something of a relief given their extremely fast nature.

The thirty levels are split into 3 ‘episodes’ of 10 levels which are intended roughly to tie in with the first three movies, but that’s really only window-dressing. It’s a little sad that they don’t firmly follow the plotlines of the movies, in fact they contain references to them but each episode is an increasingly challenging retread of the first episodes ‘9 levels and a boss level fighting an Alien Queen’. It’s made up for with some nice for the time cutscenes, the fact that you are for narrative purposes playing Ripley, and the fact that the Alien Queen bossfights are all subtly different to one another and extremely atmospheric, even though the Alien Queen doesn’t seem to change from episode to episode so the strategy you use to beat Alien Queen one still works come the one at the end of the game.

Where some challenge that’s non-designed and may put some more modern gen gamers off comes is in the form of actually getting around. Obviously being an Aliens title, you can expect to do a lot of evasive maneouvres to avoid the hordes of things that want to tear you limb from limb or oviposit the crap out of you. Doing this can be extremely frustrating at times. I do distinctly remember screaming at the game over screen at one point ‘YEAH IT’S GAME OVER! I KNOW! RIPLEY GOT STUCK ON THE %$&£ HANDRAIL’. If you don’t put space between you and the aliens, you. will. die. This is easier said than done because Probe’s proprietary 3D engine isn’t half as smooth as some other FPS engines from the time like the Doom engine or Duke Nukem et al’s Build engine, and you can quite easily get lodged in the scenery. It’s quite straightforward to remove yourself from it but during combat, you just won’t have the time, and an untimely ‘stuck to a wall’ moment will inevitably lead to you getting horribly murderised by death. It’s cheap, and it sucks, and it’s the only thing I didn’t like about the game.

With that out the way as my one negative thing I have to say, I beat the game, I persevered, and you don’t do that if a game sucks frankly. The only real issue the game has as a play experience is the unique engine causing you to intermittently spend some time looking really closely at a wall. Otherwise it’s a fantastic and quite strategic sprite FPS with a really genuine sense of immediacy and tension, that’s well worth a spot in any Playstation, Saturn or PC gamer’s collection.

Stay frosty, gamers.