I was told of this game by a friend, as soon as he mentioned Area 51 I said I had already played it, I remembered my arcade games, and Area 51 is one of the games I used to spend all my allowance on, but when I started talking about my experience, he said that that was not the game he was talking about, that it was a regular FPS and not an arcade game, so, I decided to investigate.
Frankly, I must say, I hated this game, I couldn't bear playing it 20 minutes and had to close it, as a matter of fact I did not finish it... but still don't dismiss my review, I played enough to have something to say xD
Well, according to my "investigation" xD, Area 51 is a 2005 survival horror FPS developed by Midway (Bio F.R.E.A.K.S., The Cruis'n saga, Gauntlet, Rush, Smash TV, more known Mortal Kombat and less nice games like Robotron) and it's available for PS2, XBox and PC, being itself loosely based on the Arcade game I knew called Area 51. I found very interesting that Marilyn Manson and David Duchovny did some of the voices and that called my attention to the game even more.
Well, as I said before, it's a regular FPS, the controls are ok,
everything is just ok, not awesome, just ok, ok graphics, ok sounds, ok ok ok... You play as Ethan Cole (David Duchovny), a Hazmat soldier who is sent into Area 51 to control the outbreak of some deadly virus that is killing everyone all over the place, too late they find out that the virus turns everyone into horrible monsters (tan tan taaan!) and everyone killed by the monsters turns into a monster (Show surprise now), eventually, Ethan's group is killed and he is left alone to save his own sorry ass. As you progress, you find other soldiers, my guess is that they are or some kind of black ops or alien soldiers, I don't know and don't care at all, but they are trying to kill you; also you find soldiers of your own group that help you or secure areas (most of the time the plot kills them).Later on, you are bitten by a monster, and you start becoming a monster, luckily, some Dr. Cray contacts you and tells you that he has a cure but you have to save him; you go through a lot of repetitive killing until you reach his lab, and when he is going to cure you, something goes terribly wrong and you now have the hability to switch between monster mode and soldier mode; in monster, you can run a little faster and jump a little longer, also you shoot parasites at your enemies, cool. Eventually, another entity contacts you, Gray (Marilyn Manson), an alien entity I guess, that talks in metaphors and I guess he's trying to lead your way, he updates you on some history of the game and stuff, I must say he's a nice character, and Manson's voice makes him even more awesome, great job there game!
I went a lot of stages
ahead till I got fed of it, but why? The first thing, I felt it was too repetitive, all the stages were like you get there, you survive a raid of monsters, you reach the end, rinse, repeat; a lot of games are like that, but someway I felt this was more bothersome than any other game I had played. Second, the physics in the game are bad; I have no complains usually, but this were ugly indeed -not 007 nightfire ugly, but ugly- I mean, I don't know if you, but I do hate it when you kill someone and he bounces in your direction, really slowly and lands like ten meters away, that made the game look ugly, specially when you use an explosive, all the bodies slowly fly away to the roof. Third, the savepoints are way to spaced between one and the next, and usually there's a million avalanches of monsters between them, so you end up playing the same parts over and over till you get frustrated.The main reason why I disliked it was the graphics, not that they are ugly, they are very very nice actually, pretty to see, nice ambients and levels; I don't usually care about the game's graphics -Deus Ex is an example of not nice graphics with awesome
game- but in this case, what makes them ugly is that they are way too bright, I couldn't play 20 minutes without it burning my eyes, and I changed the gamma and all that -when I could, sometimes when you change the gamma, the game crashes- but still the game just burned my fucking eyes! and it's even worst when you turn into a monster, the brightness goes up like a hundred times, so much that the backgrounds look white, and the enemies take this bright brown color, and you just end up turning back because you can't see anything.I couldn't stand the game, the gameplay wasn't bad, but these things made me not want to play it anymore, perhaps someone has played it and can tell me what they think, for me, I won't be installing and playing this game anymore.
This has gone too long now, so, to wrap things up, Area 51 is an ok game if you can stand your eyes burning like eggs on a frying pan, play it if you want, it's not bad, there are worst game out there and this is not a horrible game, it's playable, but I thought it was unbearable.
PD: sorry for the images, the game is no longer installed on my pc.
