Alien Trilogy is a 1996 First-Person Shooter for the PC, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn, loosely based on the first three films in the Alien franchise. The game is highly reminiscent of Doom, and follows the adventures of Ellen Ripley (who seems to be a Colonial Marine rather than a civilian consultant) as she battles her way through the LV-426 colony while fighting the Aliens as well as insane infected colonists and evil Weyland-Yutani mercenaries. Overall the game follows a Broad Strokes version of the plot of Aliens while including weapons and enemies seen in Alien and Alien³.
The game notably has fully 3D-rendered environments as well as items such as weapon or health pickups, although the actual weapon and enemy models are the typical Doom-style 2D sprites of the time period. It features 23 levels spread across 3 episodes, taking place in the LV-426 colony, a nearby prison facility (based on Fury-161 from Alien 3), and finally the crashed Engineer ship.
This game provides examples of:
- Adaptational Wimp:
- Facehuggers are very weak in this game, only doing 5 damage when they latch onto you and being easily shot off (which kills them), instead of instantly killing you like they do in the Aliens vs Predator games.
- The Colonial Marines themselves are portrayed in this fashion, as they barely get inside Hadley's Hope before they are attacked and killed by the xenomorphs, leaving Ripley and Bishop (who had stayed behind in the APC) as the only survivors.
- Adaptation Distillation: To say the game is a Broad Strokes version of Aliens is putting it mildly. Ripley is the player character for the entirety of the game, with no support from the Marines (they're all killed off in the opening cutscenes) and only Bishop as her backup. There is no Rebecca "Newt" Jorden, and the final third of the game doesn't involve Ripley trying to find and rescue her — instead, Ripley assaults the Derelict on her own to destroy the Queen once and for all. Also instead of the Atmospheric Processing Center's failure destroying a large section of land, it obliterates the entire planet.
- Bonus Stage: The re-arm levels, which place Ripley in a small area devoid of enemies and task her to collect as much ammo and powerups as possible within a 60 or 30 seconds limit. If the player does not get a high-enough mission completion percentage in the previous mission, these are skipped.
- Elite Mooks:
- The Weyland-Yutani troopers wearing Alien Handler/A.P.E. suits from Alien 3 that show up in the 2nd episode. They have about twice as much health as the regular Weyland-Yutani soldiers, and also use the underslung grenade launcher on their pulse rifles, making them particularly dangerous.
- In episode 3, the regular Alien Warrior is replaced with a palette-swapped variant that is about 3 times as tough, requiring about a dozen shotgun blasts to bring down instead of just 4-5.
- Level 15, the Lead Mould area, is populated by a Boss in Mook's Clothing variant of the Dog Alien that is the toughest enemy in the game besides the Alien Queen. They can take about two dozen shotgun blasts to kill, or almost 100 rounds from the pulse rifle. This is a bit bizarre since when you encounter this enemy on any other stage they actually take less to kill than a regular warrior.
- Emergency Weapon: The 9mm pistol never runs out of ammo (if you run out of 9mm ammo you just have to reload it after every shot, which takes less than a fraction of a second) but is incredibly weak, requiring about 10-20 direct hits to kill anything larger than a facehugger.
- Gang Up on the Human: The game's engine does not have monster in-fighting, so colonists, Aliens, and mercenaries will all ignore each other and gang up on the human player character.
- Guide Dang It!: Most of the game's secrets can only be accessed by doing bizarre, often random and counter-intuitive things.
- Heavily Armored Mook: The W-Y Combat Synths equipped with smartguns. They're very slow, but are very tough and can take a dozen shotgun blasts or a few dozen pulse rifle rounds to bring down.
- Left Hanging: The game ends with Ripley going into stasis sleep, unaware that the Marine ship she's on is infested by Aliens.
- The Many Deaths of You: The game feature many FMV sequences upon death, which vary depending on if Ripley was killed by a regular enemy, falling down a bottomless pit, etc.
- Mercy Invincibility: You're invulnerable to damage for a split second whenever you take a hit, which prevents enemies with automatic weapons from just mowing you down. Unusually, this also applies to your enemies; they don't take damage during their pain animation, which means that when you're using the pulse rifle or smartgun you need to fire in bursts rather than go full auto, or else you'll just waste a lot of your bullets.
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Nintendo Hard: While an individual fight may not be too hard, it's pretty easy to run out of ammo or health, especially if you miss a lot of the secrets. Learning the location of the secrets is almost essential to make it through the game. There's also the fact you can't save mid-level. - Recurring Boss: The Alien Queen is the game's boss enemy and is fought 3 times throughout the game, at the end of each Episode.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun is acquired on the first level and has a remarkably high rate of fire as well as dealing excellent damage, killing hostile humans in a couple shots and Alien warriors in 4-5 shots.
