Don't be Afraid of the Dark. Be Afraid of what's in it.
Alien Resurrection is a 2000 PlayStation Survival Horror First-Person Shooter based on the 1997 movie of the same name, developed by Argonaut Games (the creators of Star Fox) and published by Fox Interactive. As a fully 3D first person shooter, it was relatively advanced for its hardware, being released mere months before the release of the PlayStation 2. The game pioneered the dual stick controller movement and aiming controls that are now standard for console FPS games, and could even be played with mouse aiming using the Playstation's proprietary mouse accessory.
The game loosely follows the plot of the film, with players alternating between four survivors (Ripley, Call, Christie, and DiStephano) as they attempt to escape the Alien-infested space station while fighting through Aliens and the station's military security forces.
The video game provides examples of:
- Adaptational Badass:
- In the film, the General is never really shown to be anything more than a military bureaucrat. Here, he's a Made of Iron boss fight that can take an impressive amount of firepower to bring down, wields a rocket launcher and a pulse rifle, and is backed up by a full squad of Elite Mooks.
- The Alien Queen is a full boss fight here, while in the film she was The Unfought due to being killed by the Newborn after giving birth to it.
- Adaptational Jerkass: In the film, the Newborn's main sympathetic trait was its absolute devotion to Ripley. Here in the game, it tries to kill her on sight just like any other Xeno.
- Adapted Out: All of the characters other than the 4 player characters and the General have been removed from the plot, without even getting a passing mention in dialogue. A couple of minor characters appear briefly who might be Brad Dourif's weird doctor and the infected technician, but it's not clear.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: While you mainly play as Ripley, you also alternate between playing as three other characters from the film (Call, Christie, and DiStephano), each for a single level.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Your health is restored to full at the beginning of each level, to avoiding putting you in an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation (though if you don't have enough ammo or medkits you may very well be in an unwinnable situation anyway).
- As you cannot jump, walking through acid does not damage you like in most other Aliens games, since Aliens often die in tight corridors or vents where it's impossible to maneuver around the bloody corpse.
- Ascended Extra: DiStephano, a soldier captured by the Betty crew who joins them in an Enemy Mine after the Aliens escape, was just kind of along for the ride in the film and wasn't nearly as prominent as Call or Christie. Here, he gets his own level in which you play as him.
- Bag of Spilling: Ripley loses all her guns and ammo at the start of level 9, but gets a powerful electric gun soon afterwards.
- Checkpoint Starvation: Save points are typically quite far apart, especially given how the game is balanced so that one single mistake can get you killed and set you back half an hour of progress. You can backtrack to the last savepoint periodically as you make progress, but there are points where the game locks you out of backtracking to previous areas and forces you to progress forward. On Hard mode, save points are disabled after being used to prevent this.
- Crate Expectations: You can destroy barrels and weak crates with your pistol to find ammo and health. Metal crates, which having blue blinking lights on them, are tougher and can only be destroyed with a heavier weapon such as the shotgun, but they always contain either ammo, health, or a weapon which is well worth the 1 shotgun shell it takes to smash them.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Since it takes place in a utilitarian military space station, most of the game consists of very similar bare metal rooms and corridors.
- Dual Wielding: As in the film, Christie wields dual pistols that extend from mechanisms mounted to his wrists.
- 11th-Hour Superpower: In the 9th level (which is the last full level, the 10th level being the Final Boss fight) you lose all your weapons and supplies, but pick up an electric shock rifle from a dead guard. It can kill an Alien with a single moderately charged shot, and ammo for it is plentiful. It's not as massively overpowered as, say, the Half-Life 2 super gravity gun, and you still need to anticipate Alien attacks ahead of time and charge the rifle for a few seconds before firing, but it does feel more powerful than your previous arsenal.
- Elite Mooks:
- The hazmat suit-wearing, flamethrower-wielding Hazard Troopers are noticeably tougher and more dangerous than the basic security guards. Marines armed with pulse rifles are likewise tougher and more dangerous than the pistol wielding guards.
- Blue Royal Guard Aliens appear in the later levels and are tougher than the regular ones.
- Energy Weapon: In the second level, Call gets a laser rifle that can kill Aliens with just a split-second burst. It's very powerful, but once the level is over you'll never see it for the rest of the game.
- Fog of War: Like other full 3D Playstation games, Alien Resurrection has a quite short draw distance as the hardware was never really designed to render full 3D environments, at least not to the same extent as the PCs of the time. Past a few dozen feet or so the environment just disappears into darkness, though this fits with the game's setting.
- Guide Dang It!: You're likely to run out of ammo and health and get killed if you don't realize that the blue metal crates, which cannot be destroyed with the pistol, can be destroyed with the shotgun for extra ammo and health.
- Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: The game is
Nintendo Hard, but the bosses are fairly straightforward and mostly only present a challenge because of how much of your limited ammo they eat up. The Alien Queen can give you trouble if you fight her with the shotgun, but if you fight her with the pulse rifle you can just keep circle-strafing outside the range of her attacks and shooting her until she collapses. The Newborn is even easier to avoid just by moving away from him and periodically shocking him with the electric gun. Only General Perez is really potentially dangerous due to his use of firearms, boss-level health, and Elite Mooks accompanying him. - Mêlée à Trois: The Aliens and military soldiers are hostile to each other as well as to the player, though encounters between the two usually aren't really fights since the Aliens are usually scripted to instantly kill the soldiers as soon as they come into contact with them. There are only one or two fights between Aliens and Military which are completely unscripted and can go either way (though the Aliens usually win simply due to their superior capabilities).
- Nintendo Hard: The game is extremely hard, doubly so if you play with a controller instead of mouse aiming. Aliens can kill you in just a few hits and ammo and healing items are scarce. The game's difficulty was one of the main negatives most reviews complained about at the time.
- Puzzle Boss: The Newborn is too tough to be killed with weapons, so you need to run around the ship flipping switches while being chased by it in order to eventually flush it into space.
- Ranged Emergency Weapon: Your pistol has infinite ammo and can kill basic security guards with just 1-3 shots, but it takes 8-9 shots to kill an Alien and the relatively low rate of fire means that they can often easily run up to you and maul you before you can manage to shoot them enough. Killing 1 Alien with the pistol is hard enough, and you can forget about fighting 2 or more Aliens with it. Christie's ability to dual-wield pistols does make them a more viable weapon against single Aliens, but they're still inadequate for taking on groups.
- Real Is Brown: Brown is the dominant color palette (though not quite to the same extent as Quake), with brown corridors and brownish Aliens.
- Recurring Boss: The Newborn attacks you twice in Level 9 and chases you around in the Final Boss fight in Level 10.
- Resources Management Gameplay: The game is often described as Survival Horror-like due to the scarcity of ammo and healing items and how quickly enemies can kill you.
- Road Runner PC: Inverted; the Aliens are noticeably slower than in most other Aliens franchise FPS games, but your own movement speed is likewise much slower and you cannot run. In fact the Aliens can outpace you quite rapidly, while in other games such as Alien Trilogy or the 1999 Aliens vs. Predator you could actually keep your distance from them by backpedaling while firing.
- Save-Game Limits: The game uses Save Points in the form of wall-mounted terminals which are spaced fairly far apart from each other in each level. On Hard difficulty, each terminal is disabled immediately after you use it, preventing you from using each one more than once.
- Short-Range Shotgun: The shotgun's effective range is just a few meters, and even inside its effective range it still takes 2 shots to kill an Alien.
- Survival Horror: Player movement is much slower paced than in other Aliens franchise games (Aliens are likewise slower than in other games but are still much faster than you are), there is a heavy emphasis on Resources Management Gameplay, Aliens almost always attack through ambushes and surprise, and overall the game design cultivates a dark and oppressive atmosphere.
- Team Killer: For some reason the Marines will attack DiStephano even though he's one of them and not a member of the Betty crew.
- Unique Enemy: There are only about 3 of the blue "royal guard" Xenomorphs in the entire game; one that attacks you in an out-of-the-way area in Level 4, and 2 that attack you along with a regular Xenomorph about 1/3rd of the way through Level 8.
- Unnecessary Combat Roll: If you're hiding behind a corner, soldiers will roll around the corner to immediately fire at you instead of simply walking around the corner and being a sitting duck for you to shoot.
- Unstable Equilibrium: Because Ripley's ammo and healing items carry over from level to level, managing to save resources in earlier levels makes the later levels much more manageable. Level 6 and especially Level 7 in particular seems to expect you to come into it with a decent supply of ammo and healing items, as it is very difficult to fight through the level with just the ammo and healing items found in it. It's actually fairly simple to finish Level 3 with a decent surplus of ammo and healing items, which you're going to need as the levels after that all typically give you less resources than you need to get through them.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing any of the civilian prisoners in Level 6: Maximum Security will cause a Xenomorph to spawn in and attack you.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: The flamethrower is decent at clearing away facehuggers, but is absolutely terrible for direct combat against either aliens or soldiers. It is, however, a lot more effective against groups of facehuggers than the pistol, and using it for that purpose saves you ammo for the shotgun and pulse rifle.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In the film, Christie gets dragged off to an Uncertain Doom while DiStephano survives the Auriga only to be killed by the Newborn while escaping in the Betty. In the game, neither is explicitly shown or mentioned as dying and simply disappear once you stop playing as them. A male voice can be heard yelling during the Betty's descent into Earth's atmosphere, so it's possible at least one of them survived along with Ripley and Call, which would make it a case of Spared by the Adaptation.
