Area 51 for the PS2 is Midway’s update of the classic Atari lightgun coin-op that many remember fondly from the arcades of yesteryear. Original cabinets of the game can still be found in various pizzeria eateries across the nation, leaving new generations of gamers to discover the joy of blasting aliens and saving civilians at the not-so-secret Top Secret air force base of legend. In that game, one blasted aliens and uncovered the secrets of the mysterious base. In this new game, one still blasts aliens and uncovers the secrets of the mysterious base. That’s about where the similarities end.
Whereas the original Area 51 game featured the typical “on-rails” gameplay of other popular lightgun shooters, this latest edition puts the control squarely in the hands of the player via the first person perspective. Unfortunately, it occasionally seems like they failed to change the level design. Like in the arcade game, progression is a strictly linear affair with little to no backtracking. This type of design is called a “corridor shooter” in that one marches through corridor after corridor, precision shooting around corners and occasionally popping into a room full of bad guys. Oftentimes, the corridors branch into larger areas filled with enemies and other hazards that require switches to be flipped in order to open a door at the other end. This type of level design holds up throughout the game and is simple and straightforward, placing the main focus on the action.
The problem with this is that the enemy AI is somewhat lacking. Enemies are occasionally seen getting stuck on level geometry and running around in circles. Halo this is not. It seems the designers apparently made up for the enemies’ lack of intelligence by giving them sharper accuracy. In its own weird way this balances things out a bit, because it forces one to find cover in the larger rooms and get into precise, life-or-death shooting matches which can make victory feel that much more rewarding. Of course, the downside is that the game’s autosave feature does not take into account that one might die before fully completing the objective, often leading to frustration at having to start the process of cleaning out a room and jumping through its proverbial hoops all over again.
For a simple corridor shooter the game is very story-heavy. Black Ops special agent Ethan Cole is sent in with a team of other military specialists to Area 51 when an alien virus is released and other teams trying to contain it have already been killed. It hits the fan by the time Cole and company arrive, and the rest of the team is quickly wiped out, leaving Ethan to unravel the conspiracy of who released the virus. From there, the story does not really get any more interesting, save for a few twists and some nifty locations that will make conspiracy enthusiasts grin. It seems more attention was spent on the story than warranted and not enough on the action.
The game also takes a page from Metroid Prime, when it isn’t switching to an unskippable cutscene that is. Some objects are able to be scanned via a wrist-mounted scanner. However, unlike Prime, the objects that are available for scanning are usually few and far between. Rather than being used to help flesh out the immediate game world, these opportunities are simply there to provide background color, usually by lacing many of the popular conspiracy theories of the day with the game’s background story. In its own right, this works. However, because none of it has any effect on the player’s knowledge of the environment nor does it inform the player of anything of actual importance given the surroundings, it feels like wasted potential. For one to even read the unlocked message gleaned from a scanned object one has to exit the game entirely and open it up in a separate menu. What could have been used as an excellent extension of the existing story is instead simply relegated to the status of an unlockable token secret. Of course, it could also be said that if scannable objects were any more numerous or complex it could take away from the game’s main selling point, the action.
As strong an argument as that can be, it doesn’t quite hold up to closer scrutiny. The shooting is at times fast and brutal, at others slow and methodical, and usually without a sense of flow or reason. The game’s handful of weapons is of the fairly balanced variety, with six in total: four human, two alien, which doesn’t take into account the grenades, of which there are two types. The medium range assault rifle that the player starts out with will probably be used most as it features a nifty zoom function at the tap of R2 and is really the only reason the precision shooting is as fun as it is since switching to the sniper rifle makes it too easy. Whenever weapons are fired the camera shakes accordingly, meaning that the aforementioned precision shooting takes on a whole new sense of challenge. Pressing the right stick will launch a melee attack, and pressing repeatedly will chain together simple combos. Some of the weapons can also be dual-wielded, though this doesn’t have any strategic effects as it does in other genre titles, such as Halo 2. Offsetting as these slight flaws may be, control is smooth, gameplay fluid, and the framerate is steady throughout. Things are mixed up a bit by being able to morph into a mutated alien, which simply means that melee damage kills with one hit and the player can’t use any weapons.
One thing that got a lot of marketing attention was the fame of the voice actors who provided voices for the main characters. It seems worth mentioning that the three main names one sees the most attached to the game vary in quality. David Duchovny, who voices the main character, drones on in his usual X-Files style monotony while Marilyn Manson, who voices the alien Edgar that helps the player along, does a fine enough job sounding otherworldly when he doesn’t sound like he has a cold. Powers Booth is the best of the three with his commanding voice as a military authority who gives the Duchovny character his orders, though sadly he does not get nearly enough screen time to be appreciable.
Much like the rest of the game, the voice work has its ups and downs. The actors that voice the tertiary characters do a good job, but some of the main actors left a little to be desired. The action itself, while fast and constant, is ultimately a shallow exercise of who can hit their target first. The “Bonus Materials” that can be unlocked feel more like wasted potential than actual bonuses worthy of being unlocked, and the story, for all the work that seemed to go into it, is sadly very middle-of-the-road.
Overall: 6/10
Area 51 is not a bad game. The gameplay is mostly competent, in that it accomplishes what it sets out to do, but it does not really do anything beyond that. At times, it seems as though it can’t make up its mind as to whether it wants to be a game or tell a story, because it seems incapable of doing both. Most of its in-game cutscenes are unskippable, and occasionally its autosave feature will save the game at an inopportune spot, such as right before an encounter with a large group of enemies where you happen to have very little health. If you can look past its flaws, however, you will find an adequate corridor shooter that can almost be exhilarating at times.
