rea 51 is a favorite topic of conversation for UFO buffs, having spawned near endless speculation about the secrets that the government may, or may not, be researching there. It was also the setting for Midway's Area 51 arcade game, a simplistic shooter that pitted two pistol-wielding players against hordes of insectoid invaders only loosely tied to the modern alien mythos.
Midway's new incarnation of Area 51 ditches the B-movie action that made the original a favorite in 1990s-era arcades and theaters in favor of a serious, Half-Life-meets-The X-Files alien invasion story.
In the single-player campaign mode, players take on the role of Ethan Cole, a heavily armed and armored military HAZMAT officer called in with the rest of his team to deal with a biohazard incident at Dreamland. Once there, Cole—voiced by David Duchovny—finds that mutated humans have overrun the base, trapping a previous HAZMAT team deep within the complex. Penetrating further into the base, he uncovers a convoluted mystery involving human researchers trying to create the ultimate bioweapon, gray aliens all too eager to help them, and a shadowy techno-conspiracy to control both, orchestrated by the Illuminati.
Area 51 is a straightforward first-person shooter and shares most of the mechanics of that genre, including the typical first-person perspective, the expected assortment of weapons (pistol, submachine gun, sniper rifle, shotgun, grenades) and the obligatory health power-ups. It diverges from the mainstream about halfway through the game, incorporating a "mutant mode" that Cole can slip into at will. In this mode, he can see the heat signatures of his enemies and feed off their life forces by firing vampiric bioweapons at them.
In campaign mode, Cole is also equipped with a handheld scanner that he can use to analyze corpses, computers, files and other bits of evidence. These yield video clips that players can then view outside of the game to learn more about the game's backstory.
The game's multiplayer mode supports up to 16 players and features the expected game types: deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag. Unique to the game is "infection," in which one player is infected with a virus and attempts to infect all other players in the game.
Not bad—just unremarkable
As Area 51 begins, Duchovny's character provides a voice-over, explaining how nothing could have prepared him and his HAZMAT team for the horror they found in Area 51. If only that were true.
In reality, almost everything about Area 51 51 feels derivative; there's very little—either in plot or in gameplay—that science-fiction fans and gamers haven't seen before. The story offers up warmed-over X-Files conspiracies, mixing in all of the 1990s UFO buzzwords, like "Area 51," "Project Blue Book," "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities" and those ever-present, always-meddling "Gray Aliens." Some oldie-but-goodie conspiracies get thrown into the story as well, such as the Illuminati, the Apollo moon landing hoax, the Bermuda Triangle, Egyptian space gods and—of course—Atlantis. This preponderance of conspiracies could have been entertaining if they'd returned to Area 51's cheesy roots, but instead the game plays them straight and launches the entire endeavor straight past mysterious and into absurd.
Duchovny's voice underscores the fact that, despite what he may be saying, players definitely have been here before. It doesn't help that Duchovny's voice acting is detached from the action on screen; he rarely shares the passion that the player feels having just left an alien firefight that just wiped out an entire HAZMAT squad. Marilyn Manson—who portrays a deranged but helpful alien—is more successful, but he gets a boost from the fact that his voice is channeled through unexpectedly reanimated corpses that occasionally rise up and offer Cole cryptic instructions.
The multiplayer mode could have been lifted from any first-person shooter, but it does offer a few innovations. While the maps aren't nearly as beautiful or well thought out as what's seen in Halo 2, they are scalable. If only a few people are playing a game, most of the playable area on a map will be locked off. As more people join, though, the map opens up, giving players more room to run and gun. It's a nice touch, but the actual gameplay is strictly ordinary.
The game offers no cooperative mode, which is surprising given that co-op was what made the arcade game so much fun. There are also none of the arcade game's "hidden rooms," which were bonus areas that could be unlocked for shooting certain enemies or achieving certain goals. These omissions are in keeping with the new game's disavowal of the old; they went for new and edgy and ditched anything that might have interfered with that. In the process, though, they killed what made the original so entertaining, and the over-the-top conspiracy theories aren't enough to fill the void.
Area 51 isn't a hideously bad game, it's just an unremarkable one. Going into it, I knew that it wouldn't be the same at the original—and I was OK with that—but throwing in some nods to the past would have given this game some badly needed depth.
—Ken
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