Alien Legacy (1994)
Genres:Adventure, Strategy, Real Time Strategy (RTS)
Themes:Warfare, Science fiction, 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate), Mystery
Game modes:Single player
Story:Alien Legacy is a sci-fi strategy game developed by Ybarra Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1994 for MS-DOS.
Vote to bring this game to GOG and help preserve it.1 611
This is an obscure, yet an awesome game, on par with the original X-COM. Or, maybe, No Man's Sky or Outer wilds or Homeworld, as it would've been made in the 90's. I want this freedom again - to command a giant mothership, to send little crafts with limited fuel to various planets, to discover the secrets of those planets, to figure out how to build sustainable economies on them.
Alien Legacy was my first 4x game. To this day, I find myself playing it not once but twice back to back. This game taught me how to manage resources and prioritize tasks that I use 30 years later. Being able to explore planets, find history about the origin of life, and learn different sciences and how they affect each planet and better mankind. This was the PERFECT game as a child, and I would love to see this on a modern PC so that I can share this with my children.
An obscure but amazing title from Sierra, Alien Legacy is a 4x with a plot, voice acting in the CD version, and many features that made it stand out for many of us from that time period. I wrote to add this to GOG years ago; hopefully voting gets it added to others can see this incredible title.
An unique story driven exploration/economy game. It's a lot like Reunion (1994) but the emphasis is more on resource management, and while scale may seem smaller with only one star system, the planets and asteroids are significantly more detailed, can be explored, and larger bodies allow multiple colonies to be built. While it's no city builder, the colony building aspect gets interesting pretty quickly as you scale up your empire. Similarly the planetside exploration gameplay feels rather rudimentary, but in the wider context feels very rewarding as you unlock science resources and gather clues. Alien Legacy tries to do a lot of things, and although individually they're pretty bad, once you add them up, it's an unique experience that's unlikely to ever be recreated. It is also quite a hard game to figure out, but very rewarding once you do. There are numerous interesting logistical challenges to figure out, a bunch of Sierra-style sudden death opportunities, and all throughout the game - the freedom to approach things differently. One thing I really loved about the game is that the lore goes hard on hard sci-fi tropes, like the lightspeed leapfrog at the beginning, where the ship that left after yours arrived a few years earlier due to tech progress. The research texts are full of science nerd trivia that bring back memories of 1990s discovery channel. Alien Legacy absolutely deserves a revival on GOG, it's currently hard to get a legal copy to play, especially the fully voiced CD-ROM version that also features fully animated cinematics that are missing from the floppy version. There's also a bunch of bugs that perhaps could be fixed by the wizards behind GOG releases.
It was a strange game different from everything else. Its a 4x game, its a mystery game, its a colony sim, its a spaceship simulator and also an exploration game.
Even today i have great memories of exploring the Beta Caeli Star System. Also a very hard and challenging game.
Hope it gets a GOG release.
This is a game that I have very fond memories of, in spite of it's micromanagement. It tried my patience when having to shoot down an enemy (telling which enemy would be a spoiler) over and over again. Most of the story and the game loops (there are several distinct modes with one resource harvesting mode that reminds me a lot of Star Control ) are quite satisfying. I love this game so much that I have ordered the special CD version from across the pond, along with an installer to let it run under modern Windows versions and hopefully Linux Wine (I don't have any Windows installations anymore ).
I spent a tremendous amount of time playing this game back the day. It's got voice acting, a fantastic story, interesting twists, and scratched both my exploration and city-building itches. The music is also fantastic. It definitely stands out and was a huge push in making me really interested in science and astronomy. I replayed it relatively recently and I think it holds up pretty well and could be enjoyed by many today.
This is game was broken from the start. And that's why I love it.
There are quite a few hidden timers in the game. For instance, if you don't build a self sustained colony within a certain numbers of turns (turn 500, I believe), you lose. However, your colony ships only move when you don't, and your colonies only build buildings when you stay idle. I.e. you could very well "explore" half the planet collecting science points and resources, and end up in a situation where you're at turn 499 and your 1st colony is still very far from being up and running.
Still, the game is also broken in the player's favor as well. For exemple, you usually need 50-100 turns to build a new small ship. However, it is possible to glitch a colony into building 1 ship per turn.
I never played this game fairly, as it doesn't want to play me fairly either.
This game combines strategy with exploration and narrative in a rare way that I can only compare to Star Control 2's arcade/exploration/narrative blend. While most of what you're doing is building small colonies around a solar system, there are always surprises and revelations and unique challenges cropping up as part of the story as well. There's really nothing like it--a game that could only be made in the 90s.
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