Area 51

In the game you are part of a special task force that is sent into Area 51 to stop an alien attack at the base.  You go around shooting zombie looking soldiers and aliens all the while not harming your teammates.  Each level is pretty straight forward in this regard and each level ends with a recap on how you did.  When you get to the final stage you fight a boss and how you do dictates your ending.

Being an on rails game, while the game moves for you, you will shoot everything trying to kill you.  You have a basic gun that you have to reload with the press of a button.  Throughout each stage you can find weapon upgrades like a machine gun and a shotgun.  Taking any damage sets you back to your basic gun.  You also can find some grenades which clear all enemies on the screen.

While I am glad the game let you use a controller for this game, you can tell it was designed to be used with a light gun as it was in the arcades.  While early on this doesn’t become an issue, in later stages the action ramps up and being able to use a light gun would probably have been easier than moving a cursor around.  While the game does let you choose how many continues and hit points you have along with  a difficulty setting, the game does get decently harder in the later stages.  Thankfully you have a choice when you start to either start at the beginning or jump to about halfway through the game.  You can also use the practice stage to hone your shooting skills

The game has alright graphics.  The enemies and friendly characters are digitized sprites, something that the Mortal Kombat games and another on rails shooter Lethal Enforcers used among other games.  Some people may not like these types of graphic effects, but I always have.  The rest of the game is done with 3d graphics and they look decent for the time.  The music and sound effects are good, nothing amazing but good.

Area 51 is a pretty straight forward, but good, on rails shooter game.  The game isn’t very long, only taking maybe thirty minutes to beat.  However, that is only if you can beat it in one sitting.  With a light gun and/or a second player this game would probably be easy.  Playing the game solo with a controller made it more challenging.  Still, I had fun with this game and it is a great way to experience an arcade game I missed out on when it was new in the arcades.