Aliens Extermination/Aliens Extermination Arcade Gun

If there’s a movie that ever defined me, it’s Aliens, It’s a brutal action packed horror movie that features the most awesome weapon ever seen in a movie. So let’s grab our Aliens Extermination arcade gun and rip some Xenomorphs a new one.

Aliens Extermination was released in 2006 by Global VR and story wise its a direct sequel to Aliens, one I honestly prefer to the one we got. 

The game has 4 chapters and you can them tackle in any order but you have to beat all 4 to get the final ending, which is the 5th chapter. Honestly this is something I hugely appreciate in an arcade game. It means if you come back to it later you can pick up close to where you left off, which is great if you don’t have a lot of quarters and want a new experience, but not letting you just jump to chapter 4 and see the ending while missing most of the story. 

Story wise, you start by infiltrating the base you’re beset by xenomorphs at all angles, they come at you running down corridors, along the walls, crawling along the ceiling, but sometimes just pop right up in front of you. This makes it both about having a good aim and target tracking as well as fast reactions. Your Pulse Rifle has 95 rounds and you reload by shooting floating Pulse Rifles you find around the base. If you run out of ammo you’re left with your trusty pistol which has unlimited ammo but semi-auto makes it almost impossible to deal with what the game throws at you. You have to be strategic about picking ammo up though, you only get the one magazine and picking a new one just tops you up, so if you’re at 94 rounds and shoot one you only get topped up 2 rounds, so if you have a lot of ammo it’s better to clear the screen before picking any ammo up. You also have grenades and a flamer. The flamer being the far more useful of the two being great at crowd control or panic weapon. Grenades take a while to travel and I find half the time I shoot my target before they land or the grenades whizes over them into the background, they are good at instakilling most Aliens though so don’t overlook them. My strategy is when multiple enemies show up, wing a grenade at the first one and shoot the second. You later find rockets which are about the same as grenades but faster. A big point is grabbing grenades or rockets refills them to 5, but you can have rockets OR grenades, not both. So if you have 5 rockets and grab grenades, well you no longer have those rockets. There’s also health kits, grab those right away, they’re almost always a quick reaction target and you gotta be on the ball to get them.

I do want to point out that the gun and the game are in perfect sync, when I run out of ammo in the game the gun’s solenoid stops firing, then only shoots semi-auto just like the pistol. The gun also vibrates when hit and the ammo counter actually tracks the amount of rounds left. Game syncing is something built into Blamcon light guns but it needs the game to send commands using a tool. Recently there’s been some awesome new tools released, here I’m using Total Recoil from Integrum Retro and it just worked just right off the bat.

The atmosphere of this game really sells it, the environments are very true to Aliens, being tight and claustrophobic. Everything is dark and mechanical and aliens often blend in enough to make them hard to spot, without being too hard to make you squint. Crawling through ventilation shafts and tight corridors without knowing what’s coming sets the right mood and I appreciate the game spaces out the jump scares just enough that it really gets you sometimes, I really want to play this again with the lights off.

Of course atmosphere is nothing without great enemy design, which has 2 sides in a game like this, both of which are executed well. First is the design, the Xenomorphs feel suitably juicy and they really nail that toothy grin. Face huggers also make an appearance, usually alongside a nest of eggs, if you let them hatch they move fast and furious directly for your face. There’s also new enemies like slugs that stick on to the ceiling and synthetics that shoot at you if you don’t get them quick. And that’s the second side of the coin, you don’t want everything to be samey in a rail shooter, you need different ways to approach situations or it gets boring. So every enemy has its unique approach and has to be dealt with in different ways, keeping you engaged and on your toes. Xenos have to be tracked and shot quickly before you’re overwhelmed, facehuggers are a speed game of shooting eggs and hitting the ones that do hatch, and humanoids have an indicator before they shoot so you have to engage them in the right order.

One of my favorite small details is how the enemies explode into chunks when you shoot them, and they’re reactive to where you shoot them. If you look carefully you can see it’s the actual sprites instead of a precanned animation, complete with bounces. It’s such a small thing but I always appreciate developers who put love into the little things, like gore. On the flip side, friendly fire is something I hate. I get it, but you don’t control the camera so it can suddenly swing to the right and unless you have the reflexes of Hermes himself you’re going to dome a friendly. I find this frustrating, I did my best but I found myself tagging at least a few blue on each round, by the third chapter the guilt started fading but it still fronts me. Speaking of the third chapter this is when the synthetics show up, making target identification that much more confusing I may add. Since this wasn’t part of the story I did look it up, these are synthetics from Weyand Yutani which act as security and combat units, protecting the research they’re performing at the facility.

The final fight is a lot of fun, but drags on a little too long, the queen is definitely a bullet sponge, what a great design though. The previous 3 bosses struck a great balance between difficulty and situational awareness, the queen is just blast away. You do have to balance powerups with damage, so there’s a bit of a dance. I found prioritizing missiles and grenades was the way to go.

After defeating the queen there’s a final chapter where you have to escape the base and nuke it from orbit, correcting the wrong from the end of the original aliens movie.

At this point I have played through all the original aliens arcade shooters and I gotta say, this is my favorite. The story, the atmosphere, and the gameplay are exactly what this lifelong Alien’s fan needed.