Alien Legacy
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Developed by Published by Released in Genres |
Ybarra Productions Sierra 1994 Adventure, Strategy |
Review
I'm not quite sure what the first book, film or game to deal with this topic was, but it's been done a fair few times by now. Earth's getting blown up, so we send some ships to colonise new worlds and get involved with some plot that intertwines with the fate of Earth. I think I'm dozing off here.
Or I would be if I didn't like that sort of story. To most people it's probably dull. You are the captain of said ship, the Calypso. Another, slightly better, ship - The Tantalus - was sent out a while after you left, but it got there earlier, the idea being they have some colonies set up and you join them.
Except that when you get to your destination - a nicely habitable planet called Gaea (I'm sensing a Greek thing going on here) - all you find are ruins, and you end up following clues to learn the fate of the Tantalus and her crew. It all leads into a fairly short and reasonably predictable plot, as you might expect.
After battling through the clunky interface, you have your hand held through the game by your advisors. The choices are yours to make, naturally, but your choices are usually limited, and there isn't a huge amount of conflict between the crew, so your job doesn't start off particlarly difficultly. When trouble hits, it hits hard and fast, though, and you will need to make some decisions. They all have consequences and side effects, but nothing huge changes in the path you take until near the end.
So other than talking to your advisors, there are a few main things to do in the game. The first deals with colonines. You can build habitats for your colonists to live, power stations to supply power, factories for mining ore (or siphining gas on a colony orbiting a gas giant) and also building things such as robots and ships, and research stations, where you conduct research (more on that later). There are a few other special buildings you will research during the game. Each of these buildings has upkeet rates, they need so many humans and robots to run, as well as a number of ore and energy per turn, so you need to make them as self-sufficient as possible whilst still being useful and transport the rest around, though the interface makes this tricky. It can be quite an annoying balancing act at times, but luckily it's difficult to truly fail at this, since as long as you have life support, you are fine (though not productive), and this is pretty easy to maintain. There are a good few planets to colonise as well as some asteroids, and though it makes the game easier if you colonise more ground, it isn't really essential to do so more than the bare minimum.
Next, research. Research stations don't actually do any research. Instead they generate what I will call research resources, which belong to one of a number of fields, such as geology, mathematics, physics, etc. Once you have enough of these resources, of the required type for what you want to research, you can do so, and it will take a number of turns. A bizarre system, made even more bizarre in that you can fly about in a spacecraft over a planet and find these research resources just lying around. So you would never need research stations, except that during certain plot events, you are required to build loads of them. I can't help but feel they only did this to make sure you actually used research stations, since apart from some resources that are difficult to find planetside, you don't really need research stations.
The exploration of a planet's surface is the other main part of the game. It's no Starflight (despite being designed by the same guy) or Star Control, you just fly over the surface in your craft and click on icons. You have essentially unlimited fuel so long as there is either a colony on the planet or the Calypso is in orbit, you can explore as much as you like for free ore, energy and research, though it does take some time.
Despite all the negitivity that I can't help I have spewed into this review, it is still a very good game. Get past the interface, and the fact that the game just doesn't work well as an actual game, and there is an interesting, even captivating, if not original plot, an excellent adventuryness, and an odd sense of realism to it all.
CD version only - the floppy version is pretty buggy and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Other than bugfixes, the CD-ROM version has speech for your advisors (though typically for the time, not particularly good) as well as a few extra bits of video (at least I think so - from what I recall of the floppy, they weren't there, anyway).
The good
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70% |
The bad
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- Download Alien Legacy (CD) (131MB)