Midway's Area 51

Almost right after the Suffering's success, Midway for the second time kicked the gaming industry's door yelling "your eyes will bleed, but we don't give a damn because the gameplay of our new game is fierce like a cougar". Which is very true. Area 51 doesn't stop to amaze your gamer ass with it's explosive gameplay, not being ashamed for a second by the way it looks. Area 51 is like your fat ass girlfriend that always puts to shame all good looking chicks from the neighbourhood just by cooking an awesome bowl of legendary borscht. The game harbours inside it's rough engine full buckets of totally animal rage. This shooter contains so much adrenaline, rattle and alien innards that it would be enough for a couple of Doom 3 expansion packs. Game's plot is very organically woven around many conspiracy theories of the 20th century. Roswell's crashed UFO, alien autopsy tape, even Kennedy's assassination. All here. Not a game, but a dream come true for a true X-Files maniac. Even the main protagonist is voiced by David Duchovny, the main foxmalder of our planet. Despite the constant flirting with the 20th century mysteries, the fable of the story perfectly fits in one sentence, which you must pronounce in thick bass - "the dreaded virus broke out loose". Of course in this case the virus is of literally "alien" origin. Moreover, closer to the middle of the game appear the mysterious illuminati, which represent the secret government force. They wear impervious suites, they aptly shoot in the head and completely ignore who's head they pierce, friend's or foe's. The apogee of this, ahem, creative borrowing becomes a scene in which the illuminati shoot in cold blood a set of scientists. Other activities include a great amount of crawling through ventilation shafts, inhabited by small blood sucking creatures, then meeting a paraplegic professor and then a bunch of mysterious people. The spirit of Half-Life 2 literally clogged every corridor of Area 51.

Be it another random shooter that so shamefully quotes Valve's classic, I would've already kick it in the mud and offer it an offensive rating, but it wouldn't be wise in this case. Area 51 offers great amount of entertainment maintaining it's individuality. Where Valve almost openly quotes H. G. Wells, Midway prefers a big in your face explosion instead. Everything in this game is just a bit exaggerated, over the edge, if you will, and that's the main reason it can entertain you. If you're fighting monsters - you'll be facing hundreds of them, wielding dual shotguns, if it's a boss - it's a big mean multiple eye freak, if Midway decides it's not enough violence on the screen - be prepared to witness a close-up of tearing your co-worker's head off. The atmosphere just reeks of thick as oil humour. Periodically the game sends you to look for someone's high-ranking clearance head or hand to get you past the corresponding scanner. The severed head, wetting the surface of the scanner with blood will gradually slip on the floor, so you must pass through the door quickly. In short, the gameplay is meat grinder done right and sometimes the scale of it rises so much it starts to whistle in your ears.

A classic scene from Area 51 looks as follows: huge lab glass shatters into million pieces under a rain of bullets while you jump inside and on the run melee attack the nearest mutant in the teeth and shoot him at point blank range. Then you throw a grenade in the far corner of the room, from where you immediately hear screams and see ragdoll corpses flying. You turn around and witness the following picture - from the nearest vent, in indecent quantities are pouring small critters right into the room, while your remaining colleagues are firing in hysterics. At the same time starts a fire and your earpiece is picking up radio chatter full of select english swear vocabulary, from which becomes perfectly clear that if you won't assist your war buddies right now, your ass will be served as dinner tonight. In this atmosphere of mass xenocide and soldier humour goes the first third of the game. When all your teammates are eaten and you being infected with the dreaded virus, you find out that you can grow yourself a pair of claws and rip to shreds everything that moves with them being bare. If it's not enough, you can also shoot little alien parasites using the same hands.

Generally speaking, the design is obviously one of the strongest points of Area 51. Recognizing the limited capabilities of the game's technology, Midway made a right choice to put a lot of effort into the game's scale. Despite the apparent lack of polygons, bump-mapping and other newfangled paraphernalia, the picture of Area 51 is very pleasant to the eye. When you for the first time visit a giant levitating saucer, it captures your spirit no worse than your first visit into combine's citadel. Midway squeezed everything they could out of the engine that came out sometimes between big bang and mezozoic, and managed to compete and leave it's mark in history alongside voivods of the era, like: Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Chronicles of Riddick and a later game F.E.A.R.. Area 51 possesses an incredible amount of action density, there is always something happening on the screen. Every square meter of the game is filled with flashing light bulbs and broken machinery of unknown purpose that emit some kind of activity.

Despite the game's console past it treats PC gamers very humanely. The game thoroughly memorizes generously set checkpoints within each map and allows you to load any of them at any time. It's also worth noticing that Area 51 received a source port not long ago, fixing many bugs of the original. You can also at anytime just play the original game. By hex editing the executable you can easily force the game to run in classic 16:9 widescreen, multi-monitor eyefinity and ultra widescreen 21:9, which looks quite stunning.

Of course there's absolutely nothing original about this game. If i'll approach the question formally, before our eyes stands a shooter almost without a single new idea, it is obsolete morally and technologically. Conscience and fear will not allow me to raise my rating above seven points. All owners of high-end video cards, clutching in their sweaty hands the icon of Gordon Freeman will probably put me on the rack if i'll rate this game eight out of ten, but honestly and wholeheartedly I personally can acknowledge that Area 51 is one of the strongest and juiciest shooter since Half-Life 2. It grabs you like a whirlpool and never lets you go until it flushes all out. I guess living through an adrenaline filled campaign in the company of David Duchovny is kind off original thing in it's own. So be it. Eight out of ten dreamlands. And a special award goes to Marilyn Manson for great voice acting.