Alien Trilogy: Section One

Title: Alien Trilogy: Section One
Links: http://www.gamemaps.com/details/3075 
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1548946043
Author(s): Leafo
Survivors: L4D1
Notes: A walkthrough exists for the campaign.

Alien Trilogy was a first-person shooter released for the original PlayStaation in 1996 by Acclaim, published by Fox Interactive. In terms of first-person shooters, it wasn't very revolutionary but it nailed the tone and the enemies accurately enough. Regarding it's play-style it was very much a DOOM clone in that it used 2D sprites and a reliance on labyrinthine level design organized around finding keys to open locked doors while fighting an onslaught of difficult enemies, with limited ammo and health supplies. It was hardly revolutionary but for the time, it was an adequate shooter, on par with AvP for the Atari Jaguar in 1994.

Flash forward to 2011 where skilled mapper of Silent Hill fame transposed the first section of Alien Trilogy to L4D2 in a six-map campaign. I haven't played Alien Trilogy but I have no reason to believe that this isn't accurate to the game. Even disregarding the quality of the gameplay, lots of attention to detail has been made here. The campaign uses textures from the game, as well as custom sounds and models. Almost everything here looks custom, from mechanical floors and lifts to an overgrown alien hive infestation. References to the Alien universe are in abundance here. And aside from the final map, they are all significantly long and challenging.

However, the campaign exemplifies all of the traits of most generic shooters from the era in the worst ways. From beginning to end, it consists entirely of searching for keys to open locked doors through endless meandering around foggy corridors. There are no directional cues, very few reference points, and everything tends to look the same. There is no logical layout to the mazes, and they expand well beyond the point at which it all starts to become tedious. Resource distribution becomes a noticeable problem once the player discovers that hordes are called with frequency when a battery is picked up or a particular switch is hit.

This campaign was nearly impossible to figure out based on the maps themselves. Very little is indicated as to what you're supposed to do, and nothing indicates where you're supposed to go. Back in the original game, there was a map that you could use to figure out your general position. Here, there is no such tool and it all devolves into running down every single corridor, pressing use on every single door, and backtracking. There is a lot of backtracking.

In fact, this campaign was so impossible to figure out that I needed to create my own guide based on someone's playthrough of the game for the sake of even being able to beat it on my own. So much of it is just deciphered from someone else's mistakes and seeing what worked and what didn't that it just puts a very bad taste in my mouth. The environments look like they're probably accurate to the game, but what does that all matter when you can't see ten feet in front of you and you're hopelessly lost in a maze?

In addition to not being able to figure out what to do, this campaign is just plain ugly. It is incredibly ugly. The textures are obviously taken from Alien Trilogy and other old games, but it comes across as hideously upscaled rather than appearing quaint. On top of that, for some reason the mapper decided to include horrendously ugly special infected skins that are just the same single hive texture to replace all the detailed work on the special infected, resulting in a hideous mess. In other words, this is just about the laziest thing you could do as it just looks like one texture wrapped around the body of various infected.

I think one of the biggest issues compounding this problem is that L4D2 isn't a game where you can clear out a room. Hordes consistently appear at different intervals to make sure that you're always going forward to reach your goal of the saferoom. This is categorically different from a game where you're searching for keys, trying to figure out what door that switch just opened, and backtracking through a foggy maze. This is a real problem because you will eventually run out of ammo, since there are no indicators as to where the ammo piles are and you'll just be running around looking for a new weapon or ammo pile in addition to trying to figure out where to go.

The last huge issue is that you're essentially expected to know where to go and what to do. You need to know that certain unmarked walls are breakable because they hold key items behind them. And honestly that's where I draw the line. Anyone can make a map that has ludicrous secrets that only the author knows about, where progress is contingent on trying everything possible on every single wall. That doesn't make a good map. That makes an extremely frustrating one. And the reward for all of this is a very standard, even sub-par, unremarkable two-wave holdout finale in an alien hive. There isn't even an interesting rescue vehicle or anything. After the Hell you went through to get there, I guess it's a nice reprieve, but it doesn't feel like it culminated to anything. This author's penchant for maze-like, walkthrough-necessary style of maps also resulted in Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Otherside of Life, also incredibly cryptic campaigns that are for some reason beloved by the community. I will never understand why people enjoy cryptic puzzles that don't telegraph anything to the player.

Difficulty: The most difficult thing about this campaign is figuring out where to go and maintaining ammo supplies. I feel like the author was very careless in setting up ammo piles and weapon spawns, as they're just tossed around haphazardly in places you're supposed to unlock. There are no resources in the saferooms until the later maps, which again leads me to believe the author didn't really care about gameplay. Otherwise aside from an immediate horde spawn before even getting a primary weapon, there's no reason this can't be done on the standard difficulty that the player is used to.

Final Verdict: This campaign typifies the worst part of 90s shooters, and in an homage to a 90s game, no less. This shows why you can't just recycle old maps into an new context, it just doesn't work. The campaign is horribly confusing in the worst way possible, making you hate the campaign rather than be eager to find any solution. It hurts the eyes with its blinding fog and the ugly textures make this feel like the minimal amount of effort was put in. Without a guide, it is nearly impossible to figure the way out and even if it is figured out, it feels like a titanic waste of time because that's time that could be spent playing any other campaign that doesn't require in-depth knowledge of what to do or where to go beforehand. This is just very frustrating, there's no two ways about it. For those reasons, I strongly recommend against this campaign.

Rating: 0.2/5.