Since the early eighties, aliens have been a permanent fixture of the gaming scene, lending their little green likenesses to hundreds of releases. From the implacable pixels seen in
Space Invaders, to
Mass Effect’s panoply of pan-galactic alien races, almost anyone who's ever picked up a controller has come into contact with a visitor from another world.
To celebrate our extra terrestrial cousins’ contributions to the world of gaming, we’ve picked out some of the best alien-centric video games of the last decade. Just remember, on-line no one can hear you scream...
Alien Isolation
We can hardly kick off this list without tipping our caps to the most influential alien of modern times. We are, of course, talking about the slavering beast featured in Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-horror film
Alien. Despite being seven feet of pure, knobbly cosmic terror, H.R. Giger’s most famous creation has become one of the most beloved movie monsters of all-time. Although he got his start terrorising hapless space travellers, our friendly neighbourhood xeno quickly diversified his portfolio, lending his fearsome likeness to toy manufacturers, appearing on lunch-boxes, in the pages of comic books and starring in more videogames than you can shake a joystick at.
The xeno’s first visit to the digital realm came in 1982, back when video games were still little more than barely discernible blobs of brightly coloured pixels, and was a shameless reskin of popular gobbling sim
Pacman. Since then, barely a video game generation has gone by without seeing the release of at least one
Alien game. Sadly, a lot of these games are at best total pants (
Aliens: Unleashed) and at worst crimes against humanity (
Alien: Colonial Marines). Still, the franchise has spawned it fair share of legitimately good games, including the excellent
Aliens vs. Predator, Aliens: Infestation and the stomach-churningly brilliant
Alien: Isolation.
One of the hardest AAA games in recent memory,
Alien: Isolation attempted to recreate the nerve-shredding atmosphere of the original film in video game form, pitting your lone, flimsy human protagonist against a lone, indestructible alien. In a cruel twist on the survival horror genre,
Isolation borrowed a move out of the
Amnesia: The Dark Descent playbook, making it impossible for you to kill the alien. Sure, you can bung a molotov in its ugly face or send it scampering for cover with a well-aimed shotgun blast, but this barely buys you enough time to lick your wounds before the beast comes back for more. This constant game of cat and mouse was too much for some players, but that weight of oppression, that smothering tension, is exactly what made
Alien: Isolation not only a great
Alien game, but one of the best survival horror games ever pressed onto disc.
Mass Effect
There are lots of games out there that feature aliens, but very few do so with quite as much panache and creativity as
Mass Effect. A true space opera, fans of Iain M. Banks will feel right at home in
Mass Effect’s gleaming, futuristic world; a world populated with all manner of weird and wonderful aliens.
One of the best things about Bioware’s galaxy-hopping RPG is that it lets you interact with your fellow space-faring species in ways that don’t just include blasting them to bits. That’s not to say all the aliens you encounter in the game are friendly - you’ll still get to indulge in a fair old bit of cross species carnage during your quest to save the universe- but unlike most games,
Mass Effect allows players to get to know their extraterrestrial cousins, trade banter and, in some cases, recruit them to their cause.
In fact, your alien comrades are to a man and woman (or whatever passes for a man or woman on their home planets) some of the most memorable characters in the entire franchise. There’s Thane, the lethal lizardman with a heart of gold, sardonic space-cop Garrus Vakarian, and Mordin Solus, a salarian geneticist with a soft spot for the music of Gilbert and Sullivan. If you’ve ever dreamed of visiting aliens world, or saving the galaxy alongside a ragtag band of extraterrestrial allies,
Mass Effect is the next best thing to
Farscaping through the nearest wormhole.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within
Unlike some of the aliens you’ll encounter in
Mass Effect, the aliens in
XCOM: Enemy Unknown definitely do not come in peace; these frisky critters aren’t interested in swapping backstories or saving the galaxy, they want one thing, and one thing only: the complete and utter subjugation of humankind.
The only thing standing between us and them is
XCOM (Extraterrestrial Combat Unit), a cutting edge military outfit whose goal is to stop the alien invasion at any cost. Players get to witness that cost firsthand as they send their courageous commandos into battle against the sinister spacemen. Make the wrong call and your precious platoon will get wiped off the map in spectacularly brutal fashion. To make matters worse, once a soldier falls in battle he or she is off the board for good, making
XCOM one of the tensest turn-based strategy games in recent memory.
Luckily, players can even the odds by snatching aliens off the battlefield and delivering them to the boffins at
XCOM HQ. Yep, you read that right, this is one game that allows you to turn the tables and actually abduct aliens. Doing so gives the techies a chance to learn more about the aliens strengths and weaknesses, as well as reverse engineer some of their awesome tech. Snatch enough aliens off the battlefield and your cadre of cowering fleshbags will soon be a squad of nigh-unstoppable, alien-augmented juggernauts. This is good, because in the world of
XCOM you need all the help you can get.
So, next time you feel like experiencing the bowel-quaking terror of an all-out alien invasion, pop this little beauty in your disc drive and hope this is close as you ever come to meeting some real-life evil aliens.
Halo
The gold-standard when it comes to virtual aliens, few games breath as much life and nuance into their visitors from another world as
Halo. Admittedly, much of the time these aliens are zealots with an all-consuming desire to scrub us from existence, but, hey, you can’t have everything.
In fact, it could be argued that the thing that has made the continuing adventures of the Master Chief so enduring - aside from the pitch-perfect gameplay loop and that moreish multiplayer - is the sheer amount of lore and back story that has been poured into the franchise over the years. We humble nerds like nothing more than to sink our teeth into a fully-realised, carefully thought - and fleshed out - sci-fi universe, and
Halo was one of the first to try and translate that kind of world building and storytelling to the medium of video games.
The aliens themselves are a motley bunch, pulled from all different corners of the universe and comprising many different species. United under the banner of The Convenant, these disparate races worship the Forerunners, an ancient civilisation who they believe built the
Halo ringworlds as a means of guiding them toward salvation. It’s neat storytelling conceit, on that allowed Bungie to fill out the alien's ranks with all manner of bizarre beasties instead of limiting themselves to just one species. This kept combat interesting, and - more importantly, gave rise to some of the most iconic extraterrestrials in all of gaming.
In Halo 2, Bungie even gave players the chance to step into the shoes of a Covenant Elite and experience the conflict from the view of an alien, a feature which was sadly dropped from later instalments. Still, if you're in the mood for intergalactic warfare with a side order of intricate lore and epic storytelling, Halo has got you covered.
Dead Space
If Halo is gaming’s equivalent of Star Wars, then Dead Space is its Alien. Like Ridley Scott’s iconic creature feature, EA and Visceral’s survival horror classic is all about regular Joes who finds themselves exposed to unimaginable terrors in the icy depths of space. Unlike the sinuous creature that stalks the industrial corridors of the Nostromo, however, the aliens in Dead Space are grotesque conglomerations of blood and bone, human cadavers that have been stripped down and reassembled into monsters by a malign alien intelligence.
You begin the game as Isaac Clarke, a ship systems engineer answering a distress call from the USG Ishimura (Japanese for “Stone Village”, fact fans). Normal service is interrupted when Clarke and co. discover that everyone aboard the doomed mining vessel is either missing or dead. Unfortunately, the missing crew members don’t stay dead for long, returning from the grave after succumbing to a mysterious alien infection.
These malleable monstrosities, dubbed Necromorphs, come in a variety of gruesome shapes and sizes; some are recognisably human while others are twisted Lovecraftian monstrosities that flop, flap and make your flesh crawl - when they aren’t trying to peel it off you, that is. Unlike traditional shooters, where a headshot is usually enough to do the job, in Dead Space dismemberment is the name of the game. By breaking with shooter convention, the developers forced players to adapt or die and gave Dead Space a unique hook on which to hang its alien-blasting gameplay in the process.
With a story penned by comic book vets Warren Ellis and Rick Remender, the series has a surprisingly robust mythology, too, one that rewards players who scour the environment for clues, audio and visual logs. In our opinion, it’s almost worth playing across all three games just to see how the story develops, growing from a simple haunted spaceship story to a tale of true cosmic horror, one that encompasses everything from creepy human cults to ancient civilisations and alien planets. Wisely, though, the writers don’t overplay their hand; each revelation raises almost as many questions as it answers, managing to widen the scope while deepening the overall mystery. By the time the credits roll on Dead Space 3 these necromantic visitors from another world remain every bit as impenetrable, mysterious and frightening as they did the first time we stepped aboard the Ishimura. Sadly, the series seems to have been canned, but like the necromorphs that haunt the Ishimura's dimly lit corridors, we have a feeling it won't stay dead for long.
