The game is Area 51 and it has been out on PS2, Xbox and PC for a while now. So, let me tell you a bit about the interesting, yet twisted story that this game offers. You are a Special Forces soldier trained for biochemical accidents and your name is Ethan Cole (voiced by David Duchovny). Apparently, there has been a chemical accident in the notorious government base called Area 51 and you, along with your teammates have been sent in to get the situation under control and in the process rescue as many people as possible. But, as you travel deeper into the underground facility, things start to go wrong, Very wrong. I won’t tell you the whole story because that would just ruin the game for you but here are a few hints. Mutants. Illuminati. Aliens. Clones. Galactic Domination. Government Cover-Ups. I think you get the picture and don’t worry, the story is rich, exciting, and not cliché at all, meaning you’re in for one hell of a ride.

I wonder how many of us will come back out…

So what do you need to run this dark, action-packed FPS?
• Intel P3 1.4GHz or AMD Athlon 3000+, Sempron 2200+ or greater
• 256 RAM
• ATI Radeon series (8500 or better) or NVIDIA Geforce series (3 or better) or Intel Extreme Graphics (non T&L requires a 2GHz processor)
• DirextX 9.0b and Video Card with a minimum 32MB RAM
• DirectX 9.0b compliant Sound Card
• Approximately 2.5 GB free hard disk space
• 4X Speed CD/DVD
• Windows 2000/XP

You can notice that the game has low minimum requirements, and the reason is quite simple: it’s a console port. Most PC systems will be able to turn out easily 30 frames plus without too much difficulty at all resolutions.

I used my current rig to test Area 51 and here are my specs.
• Intel Pentium 4 3.0C GHz
• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe
• 4 x 512 PC3200 RAM in Dual Channel
• 200 GB IDE Western Digital
• Antec 480 TrueBlue PSU
• HIS X850 XT PE
• 17” Dell TFT
• 5.1 Altec Lansing Sound System
• Windows XP Professional 2 (SP2)

I was easily able to run this game on maximum settings and it ran great with an average FPS of 160 frames per second through most of the game. But even with my configuration, at 1280x960, the frames dropped under 30, although this was quite rare, it was slightly annoying since it was very visible during gameplay. The game itself offers no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and even when I forced it through the control panel, the game would just show texture corruption and didn’t even apply the settings I had requested. So, unfortunately, the screenshots you shall witness from my PC contain no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering at all.

Another Flying Saucer in repairs?!

So graphically, this game looks great… on the two consoles. Unfortunately, it looks outdated on PC and even though it uses spectrum lighting and decent shader effects, it appears visually like a leftover from a few years ago. The game is blocky, has low texture resolutions and well, to put it simply, it’s far from visually impressive. However, against today’s competition such as Doom 3, Far Cry, Half Life 2, Battlefield 2 and the upcoming Serious Sam 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and F.E.A.R, it just doesn’t make the cut. This has its advantages too though which I already mentioned earlier: it runs good on all systems. The models in the game are far from spectacular and the same can be said for the maps which tend to be quite static except for the odd barrel you can move.

A really effective looking "scope" effect

However, there aren’t only bad things in the graphics department and the few exceptions are the animations, the effects and the useless, but nice physics engine. The animations are great with swift, smooth movements from the numerous enemies and allies make them a pure joy to watch. The effects are well handled and if anyone ever talks to me about Area 51, I’ll always remember the cool lens effects from the guns. Finally, there is a physics engine in this game (almost becoming cliché to have ragdolls) which is here for absolutely no reason except to make the game look gorgeous when you throw a grenade at a bunch of bad guys. Apart from that, it’s absolutely useless and almost nothing except the bodies, barrels and the odd chair or box is movable. The rest, bolted onto the ground.

Not a pretty sight

As for the sound, the voice acting in this game is great and really makes it feel more immersive. I can still remember the pain stricken voice of my teammate murmuring my name (Cole…) in agony followed by a blood-curling scream. Absolutely terrific! Its an A list cast for the voice acting with big names in the fold such as David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson.

Unfortunately, they didn’t give the same attention to the rest of the sound department. The mixing is horrible and while the game supports 5.1 the sound was quite muddled and it was almost impossible to tell which direction the various sounds were originating. Quite appalling if you ask me. The music in game was cheesy (typical alien music) and instantly forgettable. Finally, the last blow to the audio is the weapons. They are all missing that undeniable “oomph” that you need to feel when you’re shooting baddies. What’s the point of killing a mutant soldier with a shotgun if it feels like you’re shooting him with an air gun? It needs to sound powerful and dangerous but… it just doesn’t.

Well, at least the impact sound of the butt of my gun against this guy is good!

The presentation of the game is respectible with nice CG backgrounds during the menus, that said the interface is so damn clumsy! The menu is separated into two different zones (normal area and profile area) and it makes it quite confusing just to quit the game. It’s also quite obvious that this game is a console port since you have absolutely no options to set the video settings or audio settings, its hard to be impressed with such laziness on the behalf of the developers. The only control you have for the graphics is the resolution and if you want to deactivate high detail textures. The audio settings let you choose volume and offers nothing in the way of subtitles, mixing, or tailoring levels of quality for various hardware configurations. Completely inexcusable.

I got them on video! I’m rich!

Okay, so by now it doesn’t look good for Area 51 according to what I’ve told you. Average graphics, average sound and a bad menu… so it’s another average shooter? Well, no, it’s much better than just a standard carnage shooting FPS. First of all, this game has a real story which is interesting and actually makes you want to play more just to know what’s going to happen. The game is tense, and always keeps you on the edge of your seat. Never a dull moment and that is definitely a big plus in my book. In addition, the game is well narrated and in between every checkpoint (no manual saves here folks!), you have a brief monologue from your character, Ethan Cole, about his thoughts, fears, etc. Not something essential but it nicely pieces up the large puzzle laid out in front of you. And what about the gameplay then?

He got 0WNED! w00t!

These days, FPSs are more than just picking up a gun and shooting everything that moves in sight. We have had, recently, many different styles of first person shooter game - like Doom 3 which is focused soley on "corridor horror", Far Cry which is about open expansive outdoor scenes with vehicles and Painkiller, which is old school to the bone! So where does Area 51 find itself in? If you ask my opinion, it’s in between Painkiller and Doom 3 and the formula works marvelously. You get to shoot at mindless animals and creatures but you also get that slightly eerie feeling as you walk down a dark corridor with a weird alien weapon on your arm.

Area 51 lets you try out many different styles of gaming and as you progress, you change the way you play. In the beginning, you have your squad, making you feel confident, and you shoot horde after horde of monsters but slowly, as you get separated (forcefully) from your team, you start fighting more cautiously and you really feel quite alone (thus very uneasy). Of course, you can still do it Rambo style if you want and that’s the beauty of the game. You can play it how you want. Slow and intelligently or brainlessly and fast, the choice is up to you. An even better thing about this game is that, later on (about after the first third), you get to transform into a melee fighting, plague shooting, badass mutant monster and this again, changes the way you’ll play the game. The levels in the singleplayer are also very varied with some large office like areas and other small perilous staircases, which again, force you to change your style from extreme machine gunning to careful sniping. If you want of course. But all this fun, changing and stylish gameplay is not without fault.

You don’t want to get in my way… Trust me!

For me, the controls were very twitchy and not very easy to get used to, especially since the options didn’t let you customize much at all! No mouse smoothing really disappointed me and so did the few bugs that I got (simply couldn’t jump when I wanted to!) during my Area 51 experience. The sniper commands were iffy too (when you zoomed in, the sensitivity was increased for some reason) and it made some parts of the game very annoying. The game can get slightly repetitive too but I already mentioned that it will all depend on the player. Oh, I almost forget to mention this, it’s quite short… There are many bonus things to look out for but in one day, if you really play quite a bit you can easily finish it without breaking a sweat. I’d say single player is about 15 hours which is not bad. All in all, some won’t mind the mindless but fun shooting and others will be wondering how on earth such a game was even published. It all depends on your tastes.

I love dual machine guns…

The multiplayer in this game is not the real star of the show and I think we all already knew that. This game was made with an interesting singleplayer experience and the multiplayer was just an afterthought. But, for your knowledge, I tested out the multi gaming and to my surprise, it was quite fun. Though I must warn you, there are very few servers (six in total when I played) and even though they were all full, it’s quite easy to guess that before long, the game won’t be played much on the internet supporting the title. The multiplayer maps are slightly touched up versions of a few singleplayer maps. I tried the deathmatch and found it fun, interesting and quite challenging.

So that’s what they do!

Even though it has many faults, some minor and some major, I really enjoyed this game a hell of lot. But it all depends on what you are looking for. If you’re looking for the Halo Killer that this game was supposedly going to be, you’re in for a very big (and nasty) surprise, but if you’re just looking for some fun with an interesting background, a few strong guns and hordes of enemies, then get yourself Area 51. It’s a love or hate game and only by playing it, you’ll be able to know where you fit in. All three versions (Xbox, PS2 and PC) are fun and well, if you had to choose one of the three I’d advise the PC (FPS = mouse and keyboard) but any of them would be fine. Just dont be expecting Doom3 graphical finesse.