Alien Trilogy - PS1

I admire it’s purity… Unclouded by conscience or remorse…

So, all things considered, I decided that I wanted to give Alien Trilogy a play. Alien Trilogy is a first-person shooter seeing Ripley trying to liberate LV-426 from Weyland-Utani and an infestation of Xenomorphs. The game is divided into three acts, each act taking inspiration from one of the three movies, hence Trilogy being in the title. The first act is in the colony of LV-426 from Aliens, the second act takes place in a prison on the planet and features the “Dog” Alien from Alien 3, and the final act is on what is dubbed the “Bone ship” which refers to the crashed spaceship found in Alien. All acts take a lot of inspiration from the settings of their respective films, featuring locations that feel very relatable to the source material. 

 

At the start of each stage, you will be presented a text blurb detailing a little about the area you are entering and a vaguely defined mission, that vaguely defined mission is incredibly important, and we will get to that in a moment. Upon leaving the starting elevator “safe room”, you will be bombarded by the atmosphere that this game is presenting. Dark foreboding corridors, oppressive music and just an overwhelming sense of dread. Perhaps that is just me, because this is like something out of the reoccurring nightmares I have surrounding Xenomorphs. Despite working with USCM, Ripley enters the colony with just a pistol, a pistol that makes the Doom pistol feel like a decent side-arm. Sure, the pistol can deal with the face huggers in one or two shots and only if they are coming at you one at a time. Anything bigger than a face hugger and you’ll be wanting something a little beefier. Graciously, in this game, if a face hugger jumps on you, it will not kill you outright, a pixellated mess of a face hugger will occupy most of your screen and chip away 5 health from you each time they latch on. It should be noted that after they have done their business your vision will clear, and the face hugger will die.

Besides your pistol, you are also equipped with a motion tracker that is in the bottom right corner of your screen, and it provides a 360 degree sweep and functions as your most vital tool in staying alive, though it only picks up enemies that are moving, so any enemies who are waiting in ambush around corners won’t get picked up until they start moving towards you. Within the first mission, it isn’t long until you get your shotgun, yes please! I played enough Doom, I know how useful a shotgun could be, especially as most enemies in this game will be rushing towards you allowing you to greet them with a load of lead into their bodies. Your first encounter with a Warrior type xenomorph will probably induce far more panic than you were anticipating. Firstly, Warriors move fast and slightly erratically, so trying to hit them isn’t the easiest. Secondly, depending on difficulty, it might take anywhere between 3 to 5 blasts from your shotgun to drop a Warrior. That’s a ridiculous amount of firepower for what will be a relatively common enemy in this game. Finally, the amount of damage they can do, I believe, is about 10-15 points of damage, which early game is very painful. If your sense of dread isn’t peaking, you are made of tough stuff. Ammo in the game feels weirdly plentiful and rather scarce at the same time, admittedly, it took me a while to learn there are some small boxes and lockers I could destroy in the first few levels that had a tendency to drop more health and ammo, but I was also playing the game on Xenomania difficulty, which causes enemies to respawn, a bit like Doom’s Nightmare difficulty, but I will get into that a bit further down the line.

So, now that the game thinks you are appropriately acclimatised, the LV-426 stages begin to ramp up in the number of enemies, especially the Warriors, occasionally dropping them on you in pairs or more, which makes for an immediately bad time at least until you get more firepower. Let’s take a step back and talk a little about the missions in the game because when you clear a stage, you will get a rating on how many kills you got, secrets found and mission completed, all expressed as a percentage, the objectively worst way to present game stats. During the loading screen, you will be given a mission for the stage, in the case of the first stage it is clearing out the explosive barrels, later missions include destroying Alien eggs, collecting ID tags from captive colonists, turning on lights or unlocking doors. To beat a stage, you need to accomplish a certain amount of the objective for that stage. Failing to do so will mean you will have to re-do the stage until you accomplish the threshold for each act. The threshold of mission completion increases between acts, with the first act only requiring 25% of the mission objective to be complete, up to a total of 45% in act 3. This adds a little more complexity to what could have been a linear experience and does encourage you to explore levels. Another incentive for clearing as much of a stage as possible, every now and again, you will do a bonus level where the aim is to restock your ammo and armour.

I should probably talk a little bit about health and armour in this game. You start with a base 100 health, located all over the place in the game, you can find dermpatches, that function a little bit like the health bonuses from Doom. They boost your health above 100 by 1 point for everyone you find. This can be nice, but like Doom’s health bonuses it isn’t a permanent boost. More importantly is how armour works in this game, armour functions like a secondary health bar. Your health won’t deplete until your armour is reduced to 0. That’s not strictly true. Face Huggers that latch onto you bypass armour. Armour comes in two flavours, acid vests, that give you 100 points of armour and bodysuits that give you 200 points of armour. A good strategy for this game is trying to ride your current armour until the next pickup, meaning your health will go mainly unscathed throughout your playthrough. Another bonus of the armour is that it removes knockback from taking damage, this can be useful when dealing with the corporate enemies who shoot at you and can potentially cause knockback to inconvenience you. Corporate enemies are a bit of a boon in this game, firstly, defeating them can drop ammo and grenades, secondly even though they have pulse rifles and smart guns, the amount of damage they do is minimal. It’s a weird point of imbalance that a soldier with a pulse rifle does 1 damage per shot, whilst a chest burster can bite you for about 5 or 6 damage.

Another important item in your arsenal are grenades! Well, grenades and seismic charges. Besides using grenades as a useful side arm, that can kill any enemy in the game with a direct hit, they are vital tools to beating this game. You can use them to destroy certain walls, and at times destroying these walls is vital to finishing a level. Destructible items and walls in the game sound like they could be a frustrating experience, causing you to throw explosives at random walls in the hopes of uncovering secrets. Thankfully, the game is generous enough to make it easy enough to find walls that can be destroyed. As you go through a level, you will be slowly filling out an auto map that can be viewed by pausing the game, you can also find an auto-mapper, which displays most of the map for a level. When you look at the map, blue pixels on it show things that can be destroyed, whether it be boxes, lockers, or walls. This makes finding secrets and mandatory items or hidden passages a lot less stressful.

So, eventually, you will get yourself a Pulse Rifle, this will be your workhorse weapon for this game, and it is at this point I should talk about a quirk in the game that will save you ammo. Every time you hit an enemy, they will go through a pain animation, this pain animation provides them with invincibility frames, so whilst it might be tempting to just go full auto on your Pulse Rifle and Smart Gun to deal with your enemies you will waste ammo during this process, tapping the fire button on these weapons fires a short burst or 3 shots. By peppering enemies with short, concentrated bursts, you will kill things reasonably quickly. Tapping the fire button is a very efficient way to use the flamethrower as well, as you can burn through flamer insanely fast, and only have a couple of kills to your rampage. Killing the queens at the end of each act also benefit from these short bursts of bullets. Queens are ridiculously easy to kill, between stun locking them with well-timed bursts of bullets and the fact they move slower than most enemies mean you can run circles around them. It is a little disappointing how easy all three Queen fights are.

So, now that I have stopped bouncing from point to point as they come to mind, let’s continue our adventure. We’ve killed our first Queen, and moving from “section 1 to section 2”, this is where things get… Weird. Section 2 is based off Alien 3, being set in a Prison that seem to be located not too far away from Hadley’s Hope. We are introduced to the “Dog” Strain alien here, named as such because in the movie, the face hugger got a poor doggo to act as host. I’m more used to calling these Xenomorphs “Runners”, but that was because I used to play Alien vs Predator Extinction on the classic Xbox. Anyway, immediately when you encounter your first batch of Dog strain aliens, you’ll notice how much slower and weaker they are compared to the Warriors. Due to this, the whole second act feels way more comfortable than the first. Sure, I am misleading you a little bit, the first Dog aliens you encounter are juvenile ones, adult ones come in a bit later, but by the time they turn up, you’re armed to the teeth, potentially with a Smart Gun and gunning them down isn’t too challenging. It’s a weird quirk I have noticed with the Alien games I have played in the last year. Alien 3 on Genesis had a strangely easy final stretch, with a ball-busting opening act. 

 

So, when I did my run of this game, I decided in my infinite wisdom I would do it on Xenomania difficulty. It terms of enemy number, I believe it is the same as the difficulty below, Raging Terror… Because naming things Easy, Normal and Hard doesn’t have any flavour. Xenomania does have enemies respawn, now unlike Doom’s Nightmare difficulty where respawning enemies are on a timer after they are killed, in Alien Trilogy enemies will respawn if you move a certain distance away from their dead body. So, levels that involve backtracking or getting lost can lead to you respawning dead warriors and burning through your ammo. So, the first act of this game was ridiculously challenging as there was one time I was down to just my pistol, and it takes way too many bullets to put a stop to a Warrior who is barrelling towards you. Respawning also impacts the corporate soldiers as well, theoretically meaning it is possible to farm ammo drops from them. It isn’t a guarantee that they will drop ammo, but typically I found that I was coming out with a net positive on ammo in most cases when I was forcing soldiers to respawn. Though I wouldn’t rely on this, as forcing them to respawn may cause more enemies to respawn than you want to, and late into the final act the amount of corporate soldiers is incredibly low. Though, something that can help with Xenomania is that for an enemy to respawn, the game requires a dead body, using a direct hit from a grenade or seismic charge will not leave a body, therefore you can stop certain enemies from respawning.

I should note that my run on this game was also done with RetroAchievements in mind. Hence the Xenomania difficulty, but another thing that is really strange in this game. You’ll probably notice this when you play the game on Raging Terror or Acid Reign (Normal and Easy respectively), that when you beat a stage you are not getting 100% kills. This is because, for whatever reason, the threshold to get 100% kills doesn’t seem possible on those difficulties and it relies on you playing the game on Xenomania to get full clears on each stage. It’s quite bizarre, and incredibly frustrating, as I had to do two full playthroughs of this game to ensure I picked up those achievements.

So, minor RetroAchievements digression aside, chances are you’d be playing this just to experience and playthrough the game, and I will say that this is possibly one of the best Alien based games ever made. It captures the essence of what would make for a good Alien shooter, there are a couple of levels that are infuriatingly dark and even though you can find night vision googles or a shoulder lamp to help you navigate these areas, they only last about 30 seconds or so. Keep in mind that the warrior Xenomorph is also black, thankfully we have the motion tracker to help keep you alive. This is the kind of game that could really benefit from a modern remaster, as one of the criticisms at the time was that the Xenos themselves didn’t look good despite using some exciting motion capture technology at the time.