Area 51 Review

Area 51 is a first-person-shooter set in the world’s most famous top secret military research laboratory. As you can probably guess, you’ll be shooting a whole lot of aliens and mutants in this game which is always fun. Area 51 does deliver some thrills early on and is a pretty fun game overall, but what starts out as something special ultimately ends up feeling decidedly average. Still good and still a lot of fun, but there are a dozen other shooters on Xbox just like it.

Story

In Area 51 you play as a HAZMAT operative named Ethan Cole whose team is sent into Area 51 to assess a viral outbreak at the base. Of course, in military lingo, “assess” really means shoot everything that moves and that is what you and your team are really there to do. There is a story wrapped around all of the shooting and alien bloodshed, but it isn’t at all coherent. It involves lots of conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, psychics, aliens (Grays, specifically), and Marilyn Manson. The only real important aspect of the story is that your character is infected by a mutant very early on and the rest of the game follows your quest to reverse the mutations your body is going though. Similar to the Metroid Prime games on the GameCube, you have a scanner that you can use to scan a number of objects and it fills in some of the gaps in the story. Scanning stuff is completely optional, but it is a nice touch if you want to at least attempt to follow the story. Even with the scans, though, the story is still pretty out there.

Gameplay

If you have played any other Xbox FPS in the last six months or so, you should already have a pretty good idea of how Area 51 plays. The controls are laid out a little differently than other shooters – you use melee attacks by pressing in on the right control stick and throw grenades with the “B” button, for example – but once you get used to it Area 51 has the same flowing, smooth feel that makes shooters on the Xbox so great. Also, unlike that wimpy “Doom Guy”, you can actually use a gun and a flashlight at the same time in Area 51. As I mentioned above, your character is infected with a mutagen fairly early in the game and this changes the gameplay a little bit. You can switch between your human and mutant forms at will and as a mutant you can infect enemy soldiers or you can shoot out parasites that steal health and give it to you and you also have a very powerful melee attack. Your mutant powers are governed by a meter just above your health that refills when you melee attack enemies or pick up vials of mutagen. When it runs out you turn back into a human, so you are constantly switching back and forth depending on the situation which is pretty fun.

All in all, Area 51 is a fun, well put together game but I have to say that the first hour is probably the best part of the game which is very different from pretty much every other game on the market these days. At the start of the game you have a number of other soldiers that fight alongside you and you go through a number of very exciting sequences where your team has to fight off dozens of enemies all swarming in at you at the same time. Very quickly, however, all of your teammates are killed and you are left to play through the rest of the game alone. At this point the game changes from huge battles with lots going on to a more average FPS where you just clear one room after the other and it isn’t nearly as exciting.

Another small issue I have with the gameplay is that you are always on a fetch quest. Now, fetch quests aren’t that bad in most games, but in Area 51 you will be sent to the exact same room two or three times in a row to get items. Why the heck can’t we carry the extra ammo our buddies need and the tools to fix the radio all in one trip? Constantly going back and forth and doing the same stuff gets a bit ridiculous after a while.

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