Alien Legacy

The Good
A massive storyline - deep, compelling and inventive. This game will eat away at your free time as you slowly come to grips with the story. What happened to the previous colonists? Why are we being attacked by belligerent plants? What the hell is going on?!

There's a need to juggle scientific advancement with political awareness. Build up your bases and military, but don't expand too quickly or your colonies will fall.

This is a big, big game, and it is pretty original. I'm just not entirely sure it's worth it.

The Bad
The 'flight-sim' bit is truely horrible - the lousy graphics are merely painful, it just takes (literally) hours searching the area for energy and resources.

The game gets pretty repetetive after a while, and although there's this compelling storyline running alongside, you rarely get to interact with it. When you do, the clues lead you in a very linear path, with little chance for deviation.

The worst thing about this game is the fact that when I finally reached the grand finale, it crashed. Re-loading any of my several save games (I thought I was prepared) didn't work. Nothing worked. I was gutted. All that time and effort for nothing.

After a few months I tried the game again. Although I played it in a different way, the story came together the same. As with any adventure game, there is just one way to tell the story. Once you've seen it once, the game is never quite the same again. Anyway, I got to the grand finale again and it crashed again. I cursed its name and threw the disks away.

The Bottom Line
A deep, compelling storyline over a resource management game. It excels at neither aspects, and ultimately proves disappopinting.