ere are the best things about the Alias game for fans of the show: J.J. Abrams, the creator of the series, wrote the story. The events in the game take place in between episodes 19 and 20 of the TV series' second season and fit seamlessly into the continuity. The actors from the show do the characters' voices, with the exception of Neil Caplan. The characters resemble the actors well enough to tell who everyone is. There are lots of cutscenes to advance the plot. Overall, the Alias game looks and sounds and plays out like an (extremely long) episode of Alias the series.
On the other hand, players who are not fans of the show are going to be lost as to the significance of most of the game's events and characters. The series is deep and layered with an intricate continuity; the game does not attempt to explain any of it. Not that the designers were required to; it is simply a fact that non-fans should know going in.
The form of the game is that of a third-person action simulation. The players control Sydney, taking her through nine different globe-spanning locations on the trail of a Rambaldi artifact while also looking for Sydney's nemesis, Anna Espinosa, who has teamed with Sloane and Sark. Sydney fights, shoots, stealths, gadgets and puzzle-solves her way through each level, all the time in nearly continuous contact with her various CIA comrades over radio and phone links.
Wigging out with a mistress of disguise
One of the joys of Alias the show is watching Jennifer Garner dress up in a multitude of outfits and disguises. The Alias game has kept this joy by giving the Sydney character more outfits to wear than there are levels in the game. How the character is dressed affects how the computer's characters relate to her, as well as what she can do. As an example, early in the game, Sydney has to search a freezer in her cocktail waitress uniform. Not only does the character look cold, but her skills are lowered and her moves are slower. Switching her into a warmer outfit fixes these minuses.
Players can clear most levels using either stealth or combat. The main difference is that stealth takes longer and is less sure. There seems to be no consistency about what constitutes being hidden. Sydney has an array of silent kill moves, depending on which weapon she's carrying, but once the player's seen them a few times, there is little reward for using stealth, not even avoiding alarms. In the game, a triggered alarm only alerts the guards in that room where it goes off, and Sydney is usually more than capable of taking out four or five guards at once.
There are several odd things about the game. There is a lot of lock-picking, but it is a simple matter of pushing the d-pad in the indicated sequence. There are codes to solve, but they're so simple that even a 30-second time limit isn't short enough to make them hard. The game appears to choose Sydney's hand-to-hand fighting moves with very little reference to the buttons pushed by the player. The environment is somewhat interactive, but no problem in the game depends on that interaction to solve it.
Like last year's Enter the Matrix, Alias seems to have been designed for TV fans playing their first action game rather than for gamers playing a game about a TV show.
— Eric
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