An interesting paradox in that it has the most content of any of the Traveler's Tales LEGO games and yet feels exceptionally lazy in almost every aspect. Actually no, sorry, that's not interesting at all. To be honest, this is one of the least interesting games I've played in quite a while.

First of all, it does a really bad job at adapting the films, even by the standards of this series. There are now only five missions per movie (because having ten or whatever there were in previous games would make the story mode just unfeasibly long) and so just by default you're glossing over a whole hell of a lot. I know this doesn't mean much because who in the world would the following apply to at this point - but if you don't already know the Star Wars movies, you're not gonna be getting much out of the campaign here. Also the levels are much, much shorter and simpler than in previous entries. It's almost silly how quick you can blow through what should really be the meat of this thing.

Additionally, as I think has been the case with some of the other recent TT LEGO games (I haven't played all of them), the different abilities and character types have been VASTLY pared down, and the overall gameplay is now simple to an almost insulting degree. All 'character' in your characters has been drained away compared to something like LEGO DC SUPERVILLAINS or MARVEL SUPER HEROES which had in the neighborhood of 50 distinct abilities instead of, like, I don't know, ten here? It's really quite basic. And therefore boring!

And this ends up affecting the real content of the game, which is the absolutely absurd overworld shit. Because when all your characters are the same, running around open world maps for MORE THAN SEVENTY-FIVE FUCKING HOURS gets really, really boring. Now, I am repeatedly on record as being a collectathon guy. I'm PYSCHONAUTS-pilled. I'm a DONKEY KONG 64-cel. Have been for a long time. But this may have broken me of it. This is the limit. The amount of absolutely drudgerous, totally meaningless shit you have to do to clear the overworld maps and 100% this thing is beyond anything I've encountered before. Yes, this is an all-ages game, but there are basically no interesting or challenging puzzles or platforming - you may as well be literally going down a list of around 2000(!!!!!!!!) checkboxes and filling them all in with a button press. Except, of course, it takes way longer than that. I've played my share of these LEGO games, and there is a really clear lack of effort in this area compared to previous ones, and there is just so unfathomably fucking much of it. It almost feels like one of those service games like FORZA HORIZON or something where you're not really ever supposed to even consider 100%ing it, but no, there's the big percentage meters all over the place letting you know how you're doing! Each level, each world, each region! And the cherry on top is that this has by far the most insulting 100% "reward" I've ever seen - so galling I don't even know if I'm gonna do the last little bit of trophy mop-up because I can't bear to give this another minute of my time after seeing what it was.

The only real bright spots lie in the writing (always pretty solid) and a couple fun deep-cut callbacks to SW lore and old EU stuff. But under that K2-sized mountain of at best blahness and at worst shocking incompetence (menus that should be prosecutable, busted-ass challenges you can cheese about twenty different ways, a frankly embarrassing amount of bugs, etc, etc.) they don't mean much.

Not a great sendoff for the series that started this whole LEGO game thing! Really should have rethought the scope on this one!

I've returned to this game a bunch of times over the years since I got it in '99 or whatever, and I've always considered it oddly compelling despite its many, many problems. This time, though, I think I've finally been cured of that. It is and always has been utter trash.

If you're not familiar with this thing, it was meant to be a kind of prestige Jurassic Park version of HALF-LIFE - a totally immersive unbroken first-person journey through the abandoned ruins of that second island from The Lost World. But rather than employing traditional FPS mechanics to fulfill that assignment, the vision for the gameplay was complete interactivity with the environment using realistic real-time physics. Of course, that's something that we totally take for granted now, but it was more or less unheard of at the time of this game's development, and wouldn't really be a mainstream thing until HALF-LIFE 2 six years later. But before you get too excited, understand how they implemented it - to interact with the world of the game, you directly control your character's fully modeled right arm in its full range of motion. Like, you hold left mouse to extend the arm and then move the mouse to wave it around and do shit. You gotta aim your arm to pick things up or open doors. There's no way to explain how clumsy this is without you seeing or playing it yourself. Imagine controlling HALF-LIFE: ALYX with a mouse.

So, that's the gameplay, that's how it works. Hard to wrap your mind around, but could probably be interesting or even fun if the game was well made! Well, guess what. This thing is so busted and unfinished it legitimately should not have been released. The physics are comically bad and all mandatory puzzles involving them will have you going insane trying to do the simplest things. Stacking three boxes to jump up onto something will take you tens of minutes. Keycards you need will fall through the world as you bash your hand against against a door frame trying to walk through it. Objects weighing hundreds of pounds will slide around frictionlessly against each other and slip out from under you like a watermelon seed as you walk on them. Oh, and you do actually get firearms and have to shoot dinosaurs quite regularly, but the guns are ......... are you ready for this? ......... also fully modeled physics objects. You have to pick them up manually with your arm, aim your arm in the direction of the Raptor about to kill you, and try to line up the iron sights to take a shot. Meanwhile, the dinosaur has run headlong into the end of your gun and your stupid noodle arm has folded up like a crinkly straw and you automatically dropped the gun on the ground and have to fumble around to try to pick it back up. Sound fun?

But okay, okay. Maybe the main gameplay conceit is somewhat hare-brained in the first place. And maybe the underlying physics engine is absolutely disastrous. It could be worth toughing that stuff out for an interesting, well-constructed adventure, right? RIGHT????

Well, yeah. But unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks too. Gameplay is literally 75% walking, as slow as you can POSSIBLY IMAGINE, through miles and miles of basically featureless jungle. The levels feel almost randomly assembled, and even in more densely and purposefully built areas, like ones with a bunch of buildings, the amount of space between objectives that you have to run back and forth between is sadistic. The dinosaurs sport genuinely hilarous AI and behaviors, and will sometimes do wacky things like die standing up, get stuck half inside objects, or accidentally skate down slopes at a million miles per hour like they're playing TRIBES. They're never scary, you can usually just avoid them by getting them stuck on the geometry, and they're always outside, making all indoor sections tensionless - presumably because trying to put one in a building would break the physics to such a degree that your computer would China Syndrome itself.

No real design skill or interesting storytelling going on - you're just solving the most basic physics puzzles, or key hunting, or following some light environmental clues to know where to go. The sum total of the story is just this lady who crashed in a plane trying to get off the island while snippets from John Hammond's fictional autobiography narrate things occasionally. Really just not much going on.

In spite of everything, you might enjoy some eerie moments slowly poking around in abandoned buildings, piecing together some little bits of enviromental storytelling, etc. It's there if you're that kind of person. I am! I love exploring weird horror or horror-adjacent stuff in first person, and I think that's why I've been giving this thing a chance since my teens. But good lord almighty, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It is at best a plodding, impossibly janky FPS, and at worst a JP-themed tech demo that does not function and should not have been commercially released. If you can believe it, there's a ton of quite interesting history about this game's development and the pre-release hype touting how revolutionary it was going to be. (Some real Molyneux levels of BS, go check it out sometime.) And yeah, that's fine. That's valid. I do believe that ambition and vision count for something, and I do understand that a game this bad can be made with good intentions. But at the end of the day, that doesn't make it not suck!

Anyway, everyone should really play this stupid game, or at least skip through a longplay of it. Hopefully I have now ragequit for the last time, and writing this has exorcised the demons. But it's probably just as likely that I'll load my save again tomorrow. Sigh.

Hard to call this a 'good' game, but it's certainly interesting. It has a pretty novel structure for a QUAKE II/HALF-LIFE-type shooter with large free-roam hub areas, an emphasis on NPC interactions/side-quests, and at least in the early game, a difficult but engaging focus on survival and resource management as you scavenge for guns and money to buy upgrades so you can survive your first few combat encounters. Definitely a different direction than you might expect at first glance.

It's a good thing, too, that there's more going on than just the shooting, because if it was a straight level-based thing, it probably wouldn't hold up at all. The levels are actually pretty fun and well-constructed, and there's a nice escalation to the campaign, but the shooting itself is so janky and repetitive. Even with the fun unconventional stuff laid on top, the ho-hum foundation will have you getting bored way before the end, especially as the rhythm of the hub world/quest design gets repetitive.

But there's a lot of good and pretty weird stuff in the intangibles that might hold your attention, if you can stomach the whole, uh, vibe that they're going for. Levels are way more alive with detail than most contemporaries, albeit in this particular run-down, scuzzy style. Those visuals, the absolutely insane-looking character models, immersive touches like blood trails and enemies deforming with damage, and the hypnotic, maddening soundtrack (consisting of like, literally two or three Cypress Hill songs repeated THE WHOLE GAME) just fully transport you into this goofy-ass urban hell that you feel trapped in but maybe you kinda like it? And actually want to kill your way to the top of this absurdly profane and childish criminal organization? And there's also these weirdly unexplained steampunk elements lending an uncanny air. I don't know, you play this for a couple hours and it'll do something to your brain. If you don't immediately shut it off for being overwhelmingly stupid, lol.

Kind of a 'you gotta hand it to em' sort of thing. Weird and maybe bad, but they really went for it.

Good, but a bit unsatisfying in some way I can't quite put my finger on - both story- and gameplay-wise. Of course the art is phenomenal, though it does occasionally feel like the game is padded to wring the absolute most out of the beautiful assets. The localization is also kind of weirdly bad in spots, which, given that this is a second pass at it, is unfortunate.

From what I understand, this remake is a massive improvement on the original, which sounds much less playable. But this is certainly that - playable. I had no problem pouring 40-ish hours into it and had a good time learning about these characters and the world from start to finish. Probably not going to stick in my mind to any real degree and I don't feel like I need any more of it, but it was a good enough time!

A very cool bit of design for an FPS from '95 - no set of linear levels, but rather a single worldmap of interconnected zones that you can explore at will. Your ultimate task is to find a certain number of key items spread out throughout the entire map (to access the final boss), and all the necessary keys to open the different zones that they're hidden in. So there is something of an order to the exploration, but there are always lots of new places to go before you run into any roadblocks. The areas don't reset - enemies stay dead and ammo stays picked up, so there's a refreshing sense of clearing out the map as you go, knowing you'll be coming back to restock ammo on stuff you bypassed if you're low, or returning with a new key later to open a color-coded door you noticed the first time. I don't know of a lot of other FPS' that were doing this sort of stuff in 1995!

It works well with the story setup also - exploring the vast abandoned estate of a socialite who went missing with all their houseguests one fateful night, and learning about the vanished characters through live-action FMV ghosts playing out the story of what happened to them bit by bit as you stumble about the grounds. If that sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it is exactly THE 7TH GUEST, and it couldn't possibly be any more clear that they looked at that extremely popular game and said "what if we did this, but with guns?". But to their credit, they figured out a good way to do it! It does work!

Technically. The problem is that this team obviously had no FPS design chops to speak of. As I said, the structure of the game is compelling, but the actual nitty gritty of the gameplay - the level design, enemies, weapons, gunplay, etc. - it all does "work" but it is fatally boring. Tons of zones are just a long hallway with a million tiny rooms branching off, and each room has a couple of enemies in it, and that's it. There are lots of different enemy types, but none of them are interesting mechanically or very threatening, so you're just going room to room, clearing it out, moving on, next one, clearing it out, next one ... and there are TONS of enemies, gotta be close to a thousand, total. Unless you're not paying attention at all, you'll never be in any kind of real danger because the enemies are so predicatble, and with only five or six total guns in the game, it gets boring faaaast. Clearing out the areas feels like homework, like doing your taxes. Coming off an extremely capably made adrenaline factory like CHASM: THE RIFT didn't do the clumsy, slow, near-pointless combat in this any favors.

So it's a real shame. The main design idea here is good, and there are a lot of interesting puzzles and touches and fun design in the manor and surrounding island grounds, but the main shooter gameplay is really just there, and unfortunately there is a lottttttttt of it to plow through if you're gonna get to the (confusing, dumb) finale. If you're a real sicko like me who loves first person open-world exploration and also specifically THE 7TH GUEST, and has himself had fun over the yeara envisioning what type of game that would/could be as an FPS, you'll probably be able to see it through. But real shooter heads will most likely fall asleep.

Oooh yeah, this is the good stuff right here. That QUAKE-y goodness all over the place. Gliding around corridors at 45mph popping heads off monsters like dandelions with a chunky ass shotgun. And it looks soooooo good, the beautiful low-res hand drawn textures on the low-poly character models ... magnificent. Look no further than the hilariously unnerving mission briefings where two dudes stare into your soul awkwardly from like a foot away - look at those guys! They absolutely rinse HALF-LIFE's bland scientists.

Anyway, there's plenty to yeah-but about - it's short, not particularly innovative or surprising, levels have basically no verticality for some reason, a majority of the weapons are useless, and it is monster-closet-y as all get out. But that last one is honestly not a big deal once you realize how much they love doing it, they kind of elevate it to an art form, lol.

The gripes don't matter if you're looking for a good FPS time - this is it. Sometimes meat and potatoes can be really well done.

A lot of very cute tricks and brain teasers assembled around a novel gimmick, but the game itself is middling and the interplay between those two halves is not very well-constructed much of the time.

At some point after you hit the big "ah ha" moments (which, it must be said, are quite good - especially if you figure them out before the manual just force-feeds them to you), you realize that the secrets mop-up you've been looking forward to after you've gotten all the items and the knowledge necessary to really do it is going to be a nightmare because of the asinine worldmap and the fact that, for a game that has an in-game instruction book that comes with pre-written notes on it, you actually need to be taking a SHITLOAD of notes SEPARATELY yourself to even begin to remember all the stuff you need to go back to or even where shortcuts are. I love a good Figure-It-Out-'Em-Up and especially one that wants me to write things down, but I didn't realize that to be successful with this one, I essentially needed to be drawing another set of maps on top of the ones the game gives you as like, it's whole thing, and by the time I realized it, it was a bit too late.

But anyway, some fairly big points for effort. Especially the language - although I am conflicted with how that whole thing is integrated, too.

Just by the nature of the viewpoint, FPS games achieve a level of immersion other genres can't really touch, and under certain circumstances, that can lead to some quite unique gaming experiences. I'll preface by saying that I've mostly only played good FPS games and I'm not overly acquainted with some of the incredibly insane older stuff like this and all the gonzo WOLFENSTEIN clones on the Pie in the Sky engine and whatever else, so I'm sure that there's probably quite a few games that would elicit this response from me - but I found PO'ED to be a uniquely hellish and disorienting experience that I needed to put down pretty much immediately because it felt like playing an actual nightmare. (Like, I was okay, I wasn't having a panic attack or anything, it was more like my brain was just kind of gently rejecting the inputs it was getting, like there was a small red warning light blinking on the dashboard of my mind saying, "hey, you should really turn this off" with increasing urgency the longer I played.)

You skate around these stark abstractions of spaceship interiors, hopping across single-flat-polygon platforms and elevators, level geometry seemingly assembled at random, wildly swinging a fucking bloody meat cleaver at these horrors, these puzzlingly formless and yet somehow sexualized enemy sprites, and trying desperately to keep your senses as the PS1 wall textures swimmmmmmm and tillllllllt. Judging by the manual, I guess the tone is supposed to be ... funny? Like tongue-in-cheek? But I mostly just felt like I was experiencing some talentless, deranged game designer's version of Vincent D'Onofrio's mind palace from The Cell.

Extraordinarily bad vibes. Not recommended.

Looks and sounds great/authentic, but that's about the best you can say for it.

First and probably least importantly, calling this "Alien Trilogy" as though it is an adaptation of the films is extremely funny. At best, it gestures towards them, lazily and incompetently. This isn't really a problem with the game as a game, per se, but just more of a headscratcher/pet peeve for me. It does Aliens first and even struggles with that one - you know, the one that's essentially been the basis for a significant percentage of all video games ever made? If you can't manage to make ten FPS levels out of big Jim Cameron's "ALIEN$" without having the player fight infested humans and androids or having them blow up contraband cargo containers for some reason, I'm sorry, but try fucking harder.

Anyway, one of the bigger problems is that it is just boring. Quite straightforward, structure-wise, and that's especially disappointing given how good the Marine campaign from ALIEN VS. PREDATOR on Jag just was. And this has actual movies to go off of! But nah, it's just normal-ass levels where you have to get the exit. There are other stated objectives you're supposed to do along the way, but they are completely optional for some reason, so who cares? And there's very little grace to the enemy placement or level design. Just rooms and halls and packs of enemies. Buttons to press to make elevators go. Yawn!

This would probably be fine if the FPS fundamentals were in place, but they aren't. Some accomodation should be made for this being a pre-GOLDENEYE console shooter, I guess, but the aiming and the shooting and the hit detection just suck. For the non-shotgun weapons, your bullets are actually modeled and fly through the air about as fast as a Nerf dart, meaning you end up having to lead enemies than are any more than two feet in front of you. You're also shooting down at the floor most of the time for some reason, I guess to be able to hit face huggers by default? I dunno, it just doesn't feel good.

Given the great graphics and atmosphere, making this a bog-standard corridor shooter is a waste, and especially given the conceit that it's supposed to be capturing what made the movies special. Do better!

Probably the best pre-DOOM, WOLFENSTEIN 3-D-like anyone ever made, prefiguring games like ... what's that? This came out in 1994? Same month as DOOM II? Oh. Well ... okay.

Anyway, yeah, it's ... primitive, but it's damn good! Takes the very simple grid-based, flat-planes-and-doors FPS framework and does about as much as you possibly can with it, essentially making what might be better classified as a survival horror game. That's in Marine mode, at least. The other two playable races both have distinct mechanics that give very different rhythms to their campaigns - the Alien must use a risky special move on living Marines to cocoon them and earn themselves extra lives/spawn points to eventually wear down the humans with overwhelming numbers (appropriate), and the Predator can run around invisible but must kill uncloaked to earn honor points and unlock the weapons they'll need to take on bigger game. I don't think either is as compelling as the human campaign (which is just a well-structured, surprisingly open FPS world map with a well-designed flow of objectives and areas) but they make for nice add-ons.

The lo-fi look and feel (no music! just ambience!) works great for the subject matter. Despite this thing's limitations and playing it on my laptop in the middle of the day, I couldn't help but find myself riveted and little creeped out. I honestly kind of want to buy a Jaguar now, just to play this on hardware.