Developer(s) Konami Director(s) S. Okamoto Series Alien | Publisher(s) Konami Composer(s) Masanori Adachi Platform(s) Arcade | |
Aliens is a shoot 'em up developed and published for the arcades by Konami in 1990. It is based on the film of the same title.
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Gameplay
Aliens is primarily a side-scrolling shooter in which the player must defend against various Aliens, with certain parts of the game switching to a first-person perspective. The player can play as either Ellen Ripley or Corporal Hicks, who both begin the game with a pulse rifle and can upgrade to other weapons such as flamethrowers and grenade launchers. The player is given several health points, one of which is lost if the player is attacked by an Alien. The player loses a life if all the health points are lost, and the game ends if all the player's lives are depleted. Boss enemies are encountered at the end of each level, with the final boss being the Queen Alien, which the player fights with an exoskeleton loader. A two-player mode is also available. The enemies range from standard ones seen in the films to specialized ones created exclusively for this game. When fighting the Alien Queen, two victorious outcomes are possible. In the first, the player simply activates the airlock, as in the 1986 film. If the player chooses, they can fight the Queen further, wearing her down until she bursts apart.
Reception
Upon release, Julian Rignall of Computer & Video Games gave Aliens an overall score of 91%, noting its "simply brilliant" graphics and describing it as "one of the goriest coin-ops since Splatterhouse." CU Amiga gave Aliens a 44 percent rating and criticized its "uniformly bland and drab" graphics, its "irritatingly unresponsive" controls, and its "dull" action.
More than a decade and a half later, Retro Gamer editor-in-chief Darran Jones praised it as a "superb" game. In a more reserved opinion, Stephen Kleckner of GamesBeat included Aliens in his list of "must-play" Alien franchise games, but wrote it "is competent and entertaining for a quarter sucker, but it lacks the creative push in gameplay found in other entries on this list." Brett Alan Weiss of AllGame gave Aliens three and a half stars, calling it an "enjoyably fast-paced" and "graphically creepy, smoothly animated game".