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"The ultimate "Just five more minutes" game"

Alien Legacy was released in 1994 by Sierra. Unlike normal where they would release an adventure game, this game was much different. it combined HARDCORE micromanagement with mystery, intrigue, storyline, and to be honest, the crappiest action ever seen in a game. OK that doesn't make it sound great, but whilst the action is crap, the rest is good so bear with me!

THE STORYLINE: It's a few hundred years in the future and Earth is having some problems. About 100 years ago they developed new ways to travel extremely quickly in space and colonise other planets. Spreading themselves thinly over the solar system, the first problems become apparant when one of their colonies is mysteriously destroyed. It isn't long before the problem reveals it's true nature. An alien race, the ''Centaurians'', have run out of room and resources in their home solar system and have sent out ships to colonise other Solar Systems with orders to destroy any life in those Solar Systems. And, yep, you guessed it, that includes us poor humans. Oho, but we're not toally defenceless! We have ships, and missiles! We're cool! Our ships are far bigger than the Centaurian's ships! Watch us go! HAHAHA!!!

Sure enough, humankind loses the war and finally is driven back to Earth alone, all other planets are overtaken when Dr. Ramakin, a scientist, develops a new engine prototype that can travel almost at the speed of light! At this, Earth decides to make a bold and desparate attempt to let humankind survive. They launch off three ''Seedships'', each one to a various Solar System, and each one powered by the Ramakin engine. You are the captain of one of these seedships, the ''Calypso'' given the mission to make sure humankind survives at ANY COST. You are to assume the other two seedships failed their mission and that you are mankind's last hope. You are put in stasis for many years whilst your seedship completes it's journey.

You awake from Statis, and are in the Beta Caeli Solar System, around a planet called ''Gaea'', very similar to Earth! You're about to start to colonise it when your robot adviser informs you that the computer's memory was damaged whislt en route and he has only just finished repairing it. When checking it out, you find a startling message from Earth - apparantely shortly after you left, they developed a NEW AND IMPROVED Ramakin engine that even though they developed it 12 years after you launched, they calculuated if they launched now would get them to Beta Caeli 21 years before we would! So they put an officer that outranked you in charge and sent her off in this new Ramakin engine seedship, called the ''Tantulus''. Your new mission objectives are now to assist this outranking officer in any way that is needed.

Feeling a bit screwed over you check out the surface to find... Nothing. No trace of the Tantulus, or any of the crew. No signs of any former towns. NOTHING AT ALL, like nothing's ever even been there. Your job is as it was before then, to help humankind survive, and ALSO to figure out what happened to the Tantulus. But it will not be an easy journey!

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This game has many different styles of gameplay. I will attempt to explain them all thought it's VERY difficult since nothing's really quite like it ^^;;;

Basically the entire idea is that you're permanently aboard the Calypso. You have various advisors to give you decisions and inform you of important things, but basically you sit aboard the Calypso and govern what's happening. And boy, do you ever have a lot to govern. Your duites range from actually building the various colonisations, in which you're on a sort of grid based map where you place buildings and the like. The trick is to try to make every colony self sufficient, but this is a lot harder than it sounds - you're losing ore quickly so you built an ore factory, but unfortunately this soaks up lots of energy, so you need powerplants too. Of course, this takes human resources which can't exactly just be ''produced'', and robots are required too, which require vast amounts of ore and energy to make. Life support is also required - and each of these detract from the other, creating a delicate balancing act that is relatively easy to meet, but whenever you try to expand the whole thing tumbles and you find yourself desperately trying to get everything in the green again. From here, you can find various scientific resources, and also do scientific research. You must also get used to scouting the planet (once again divided up into various hex grids) with ships for resources, important findings, sings of the Tantulus etc. and anything your advisors, erm, advise. You'll have a million different things coming at you at once, and basically anything that CAN go wrong, WILL go wrong. Your resources plants will blow up. You will be attacked by native wildlife. And yes, you will be attacked and relatively defenceless against aliens that don't LIKE you colonising their Solar System and sucking up their resources. As well as managing all of this, you have to make sure you're producing enough robots, space vehicles, researching scientific discoveries that you learn a bit of from various places, and also trying to keep many colonies per planet (and there's about 25 planets in all (and some planets can take up to 10 colonies if you're foolish enough to attempt to manage them) though it takes AGES to get to them all ^_-) all up and running simultaenously. You NEVER run out of things to do. Just as you get everything running smoothly something else needs attending to. This is one of those games where you always want ONE MORE MINUTE, because by the time you've fixed that problem, another 5 have come up. And the whole time, you're trying to figure out what the hell's going on, what happened to the Tantalus, if indeed it even made it at all, and just trying to survive in an alien galaxy.

Being the captain, you have to make the decisions. Native fawna and flora are attacking your towns! You've determined that they're being instructed to do this due to some alien pylons. Your military officer advises you destroy the pylons. Your scientific officer says leave them, develope some cool virus that will affect them not us. Which path do you go down? You want to keep your Calypso in orbit to shuttle resources down to your developing Colonies but it's also needed at other planets. Will you send it on or not, knowing that your ships will have to travel further to deliver resources, and won't be able to fly back until the Calypso reaches the next planet? Your Calypso cannot mine Ore (as there doesn't just HAPPEN to be any in the surface of a spaceship, you can't DIG it out...) so you need it from somewhere. But it's flying between planets. How are you going to get it to it? We'll have to research special machines to do it for us, but that takes time and resources that could be put to use elsewhere, and there's always the problem of just as everything is working right, SOMETHING WILL GO WRONG.

I have tried and I have failed to describe this game. It's just sooo captivating, so thrilling, so DIFFERENT to play. There is NOTHING like it. It's like a HUGE hardcore micromanagement strategy action adventure sim sci fi EVERYONE game all at once. My advice to you - If you can, get this game. It'll be CHEAP and it's so bloody addictive you just can't seem to stop playing it.

---Individual breakdowns---

Sound : I'm sorry, but it's shithouse. There's about 3 tracks of music and they're all annoying. The sound effects themselves are limited to ''boop''s and ''p-kaw!''s. 4/10 if I'm being kind. 6/10 if you have the CD version because it's got full speech! ^_^ But the voice acting is HORRIBLE. The robot sounds different everytime. In the middle of one thing it says, from one paragraph to the other the voice COMPLETELY changes. It's shocking >__<

Graphics : Considering the time it was released, pretty bloody good! However not that flash for today's world, albeit functional. 7/10 for functionability.

Storyline : I love a storyline that constantly evolves, and there is barely a game that has a storyline that evolves like this one. The stuff of legends. However, it is horribly cliched which is why it didn't score as high as it sounds. 8/10

Gameplay : When does 1 minute = 6 hours? When you tell your parents you'll finish playing in ''1 minute''. This game throws so much at you so quickly and simply demands far more time than school, university, a job, a girl/boyfriend, pets, and a social life all put together. Simply put if you want to ALWAYS have something to do for 100+ hours solid, this is the game to play. And it barely ever gets tedious ^_^ 9/10

Overall 9/10. A game that is FAR more fun to play than it should be when inspecting it bit by bit. One of those game designs that just WORKS. One of the most damn addictive games I've ever played! Though it technically sucks in nearly every department, it's just soooo fun I can't help but give it a 9. BUY IT NOW! I'm watching you...!!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/02/03, Updated 06/02/03