Just an absolutely awesome game! Leans heavily on stealth; it is definitely not a "run and gun" type game. But that is exactly what you would expect from an Alien game, right? And this game delivers in spades! The space station is expansive and you get to explore a wide variety of areas. Some levels feature the alien while others feature androids. And sometimes fellow humans give you grief! It all adds up to a lot of gaming and a lot of variety. It is Very Scary! I have played a lot of games but never one that gave me such frightening moments as this one. The story is so good and everything in the game makes perfect sense! You never get the feeling that you are just completing tasks & quests; everything is logically moving along toward the final outcome. And speaking of outcome...I hope this game is so successful at GOG that the developer gets interested again and decides to produce a sequel! I have owned it for years from Steam and the moment it came to GOG I bought it again! TL:DR - If you enjoy stealth and the Alien story and horror...you will LOVE this game!
I have tried to play this game. Several times. And I keep it installed to try again at some point. But so far it is uninteresting and tedious! They make such big promises like unlimited worlds but every world seems almost the same as every other world. Different colors. Terrain rearranged. Maybe 3 or 4 creatures that all can be ridden or milked or tamed. They all react mostly the same way. And they are all built from the same limited toolbox of critter parts. The tedium begins immediately because your ship is broken and you must mine stuff to fix it. Once I got my ship I thought "OK, now it will get fun!" but...NOPE! Once I discovered other sentient creatures I thought "OK, NOW it will get fun!" but again...NOPE! I even got off the planet to a space station and got bored really quickly "talking" to a variety of beings who all seem to be humanoid in shape except for their heads! I tried to learn their language...ONE...WORD...AT...A...Time! So I asked my (adult) son to give this a try and...he doesn't get it either! The only fun we managed to have was to ride creatures around at double-speed while playing the Benny Hill music! That fun lasted just a few minutes. This "game" just seems horrible to me! Maybe I just don't get it. I welcome anyone who can show me where I am missing the point of this thing.
It was a tough choice between giving this 3 or 4 stars. If you are a big fan of classic Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts games then this one is a must-play because it really delivers a shot of graphic adventure nostalgia! The puzzles were clever and never too hard but also did not seem too easy either! I played it with my adult son and we never had to get any clues to complete it nor were we ever stuck more than a few minutes. The use of multiple characters was interesting and even though some of their dialogues were identical, this did not feel like much of an issue. The characters were a wee bit boring except for Ransom the Clown, who was delightful! The game has a couple of problems that cost it a star for me. The first is the mechanics of the interface was very tedious on a console. We played it on Xbox One and items that should have been defaulted to the USE command would always be LOOK so we found ourselves being reminded far too often that elevator buttons were indeed elevator buttons when it would have been FAR MORE USEFUL to simply have the default for the elevator buttons to have been USE after they had been LOOKED at once or twice! Lots of wasted time and frustration with the interface! The second issue is they brought the annoyances of 1990s adventure gaming back along with the good stuff! I don't want to mention specifics and risk a spoiler but one example is...after a few times of listening to a character's canned dialogue cut scene that you cannot skip, it seriously drops the fun factor! And there were other areas where we felt they could have left out a 1990s annoyance but thankfully there was enough fun in the game to overcome this. My bottom line is, if you were a big fan of games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle then you have to play this. If you liked early graphic adventure games you should seriously consider this. If neither of those describes you then you might wanna take a pass or wait until it gets down to around 5 dollars!
