Aliens: The Computer Game

aka: Aliens
Moby ID: 10461
Commodore 64 Specs
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Description official description

Electric Dreams' game based on the 1986 film Aliens is a first-person strategy game somewhat similar to Space Hulk. The player controls six characters from a remote terminal, guiding them through a 255-room complex in search of the Alien Queen. Each character has a helmet camera and a smart gun, each controlled by the player acting in the role of overall operational commander.

The player can switch to any character at any time, and must consider coordinating their movements and finding a safe location before switching to the next character. Characters occupy one room at a time, and can pan their view a full 360-degrees inside each room. Doors can be locked to halt Alien progress, or blasted open to get through (at the cost of permanently destroying the door). Alien bio-mass must also be destroyed before it spawns facehuggers, and the Aliens themselves leave lethal puddles of acid when killed (and so shouldn't be killed in front of doors!).

Aliens prowl the complex and are attracted to gunfire. They will home in on nearby characters and attack, requiring the player to aim that character's gun to defend against the rushing Alien (a headshot kills instantly, while three to the body do the same). If an Alien attacks a character the player is not controlling, they will "capture" that character (indicated by a yellow status light). The player must guide another character to the position of the hostage and kill the guarding Alien to rescue them. If not, the captured character will be lost.

Ammunition for all characters is limited, and refilled only by making a trip to the complex's armory. Similarly, a medical bay can replenish any damage. Characters also have limited stamina, used up with every move made. When stamina is low, the player must find a safe spot for that character to rest up. The complex also houses a generator controlling the lights, which the Aliens can destroy, or the Marines can then repair.

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Credits (Commodore 64 version)

4 People

Game Design by
Graphics by
  • Focus
Code by
  • Soft Machine
Production by
  • Software Studios

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 10 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 22 ratings with 1 reviews)

Boring to start with, but gets difficult much later

The Good
The Electric Dreams version of Aliens is based on the action segments of the movie. You control Ripley, as well as five other characters, who must escape from a base that is situated on the planet LV-426, quite some distance away from Earth. During their travels, they must kill aliens that they encounter, including warriors, face huggers, and queens. Their mission gets difficult from time to time. You control each of the six characters using a first-person perspective, in which you use the joystick to guide your camera left or right, and press [Space] to open doors. You can switch between characters at any time during the game.

When I got into Aliens, the first thing that I noticed is the interface. At the bottom, you have the six character names on both the left and right of the screen, and each half is separated by the huge picture of the character you are controlling, and the health and ammo indicators at either side of the picture. The indicators have a vertical display, not horizontal. The set-up of this interface is clean, and the elements are not just put in anywhere unlike other games.

The graphics are good. Although all that you are looking at are walls, the walls themselves are well drawn, consisting of gadgets that are not interactive. The color of the walls are blue and red on the early floors, but are green on later ones. It is possible that the higher up you go, the more colors that you see, but I haven't made that far yet.

The sounds are also good. The game lets you know when an alien enters the same floor you are on – by a sound similar to what motion detectors sound like, and the sound gets faster meaning that you are in danger of being eaten by an alien. Gun shots are also heard.

Getting your six characters through the complex involves some strategy, as you have to know when you can start taking each character through the base, what floors you need to travel to first, and if there are any aliens on your floor, find out if you can go to another floor without the need to shoot it. It is best not to shoot at all, since shooting can often attract aliens to your floor.

The Bad
Unlike the Amstrad CPC version, the C64 version lacks the cool music while you play, and the shooting of your weapon produces a thumping sound, rather than an actual gun sounds. Speaking of weapons, it would have been nice to have infinite ammo, but you don't, and I had no idea where to get more ammo if I needed it. (Actually, you do get infinite ammo on Floor 028, but that's the only floor I got to so far.)

The game starts out boring, as you first have to travel from floor to floor and see if there are any aliens that are already there. The higher difficulty when you get further into the game is supposed to make up for this, as aliens appear on floors that your comrades are on every five seconds, and you find out that you need to switch characters more often so that you can deal with them. I can only get up to level six in the game – the level in which the lights are turned off, making it impossible to find aliens, unless you shoot your weapon to light up the room.

Some floors have walls that are covered with mucus cocoons, which reveal hidden doors when shot at. Shooting at these cocoons wastes a lot of ammo, as you're trying to find out where exactly among the shit is the door. There are a lot of floors in the game, and it is very easy to get lost without some map that you can refer to.

The Bottom Line
Good action game based on the movie of the same name. All you have to do is get six people through the complex, while shooting aliens that you may encounter along the way. Getting through the complex itself can be quite a challenge. Aliens may be boring when you first start, but it gets more and more difficult as you proceed further into the game. Activision's version is much better than this.

Commodore 64 · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2005

Trivia

Contemporary Aliens releases

This was one of two contemporary games based on the James Cameron film. The European title was developed by Electric Dreams as a straightforward first-person maze game for the popular European 8-bit computer formats. In the US, Activision developed their own Aliens game, which was a compendium of six arcade mini-games. Electric Dreams released it for the European market a few months after their own title as Aliens: The Computer Game, with the Amstrad and ZX Spectrum versions ported by the Mr Micro development team.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Der.Archivar.

Commodore 16, Plus/4, ZX Spectrum added by Kabushi. MSX added by koffiepad. Amstrad CPC added by Katakis | カタキス.

Additional contributors: Ashley Pomeroy, Sciere, Dan K, Patrick Bregger.

Game added September 27, 2003. Last modified January 21, 2024.