"Takes elements from the show and brings it to console."

All the hype about this game lead me to believe it would be a good game but that's not the case here. Alias is perhaps one of the most annoying and irritating games I've played in a while.


GRAPHICS
Good. There was a fair amount of detail to the graphics, and the character models are good. The cut scenes are also quite good. This is probably the best part of the game except for the humor.

SOUND & MUSIC
Fair for sound, good for music. The sounds are average, nothing special. The gunfire is rather generic, nothing special.
The music is good, I'm not sure if it lines up with the show since I never watched it, but the music keeps up with the atmosphere of the game.

PLAYABILITY & CONTENT
Fair. The game itself really isn't much fun. A few good things about the game is the humor, there is a techno whiz that's kind of the comic relief and he's pretty funny.

Another is the fact you can use a lot of items as weapons, such as pool cues, frying pans, pipes, and a whole lot of others. Sounds good which it is, but what I found stupid was no matter what weapon you use it will break after a short time of use. Regardless whether it's a pool cue, or a money wrench, after you hit someone a few times it breaks and because useless.

I honestly never knew a monkey wrench to break from hitting someone with it. The game would be more enjoyable if you actually could keep the weapon. When the enemy hits you with it however, it never breaks at all, and they also never run out of ammo. If you grab their gun, you only get 15 shots at the most, then you discard the gun.

Also, the voices for the enemies are the same except the females. They say the same things over in the same exact voice, it would have been better if they at least bothered to use a few people for voice overs. You never start a mission with any guns which is stupid, you should at least get a pistol. You have to take guns from enemies. I don't think any agent in their right mind would take on such missions without a fire arm.

The fighting system needs work, unless you lock on your enemy with the lock feature, you often wind up kicking past them or missing altogether, and the blocking needs work too. Half the time you can't tell if your blocking, and if you actually do block, the enemy winds up grabbing you half the time and throws you around. What was really irritating is enemies with guns, you have to manage to get close to them somehow and attack, often however they back off and shoot you down to the ground, and when you try to get up the shoot you down again.

You run too slow and they back up practically as fast as you run at them. The most irritating part of the game is the timed scenarios, where you only have a few seconds or minutes to do something. Often, you have no clue what you should do and wind up doing the scene several times before you figure it out. For example, one scene you become trapped in a dressing room and they start to pump poison gas in it (guess they hate actors). Your base tells you to get out of there but doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it and you only have a few seconds before you die. So you wind up running around trying to figure it out, often dying.

A good thing though about the game is practically each mission you have an alternate outfit that you can change into. This only works for a while though then the enemies will always mark you as an enemy regardless what outfit you have on.

CONTROLS
Presets.

SAVING FEATURES
Checkpoints only.

THE GOOD
Graphics.

THE BAD
Weapons break too much.
Somewhat boring.
Not enough direction during missions.

THE UGLY
Nothing notable.

OVERALL RATING 5

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/19/04