Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jessica Alba and Jennifer Garner all have something in common, aside from their frequent appearances together in daydreams of mine that involve kiddy pools filled with Crisco oil and a video camera with an inexhaustible battery. That is, they've all had their popular butt-kicking, grrrl-power TV shows turned into video games.
The thing about video games based on movie or TV licenses, though, is that they tend to suck. Mightily, even. There are exceptions, of course, like the Lord of the Rings games or a couple of the Star Wars titles, but TV shows in particular seem to get the most savage treatment when making the leap to interactive entertainment.
With that in mind, one of the best things you can say about Acclaim Entertainment's translation of ABC-TV's spy-girl drama Alias into the realm of joystick jiggery-pokery is that it doesn't suck too badly. And in this case, it's not so much damning with faint praise as it is praising with faint damnation.
Alias puts you in the, erm, pants of CIA agent Sydney Bristow, as portrayed by the future Mrs. Jennifer Garner-Tilley on the TV show. The game plays as sort of a lost episode of the series, occurring near the end of the second season. While that might not make much difference to those who don't watch the show, it's key information for the legions of Alias fans out there, particularly those who tune in for more than the possibility of seeing Jenny in a geisha costume.
And that, really, is the primary problem with the game. While it's your basic third-person stealth-action experience, a genre that's starting to become as crowded as a dockside cathouse when the ships are in, Alias seems to be trying to appeal primarily to casual gamers who are fans of the show. If you don't know who Anna Espinosa and Mr. Sark are, the game's storyline is going to mean little to you, and may even be baffling at times.
Which would be fine if the game itself was exceptionally innovative or engrossing, but it's not. It's solid enough, sure, and there are a couple of interesting touches, like the way the screen will split into two perspectives at key moments to give you a better look at a threat that needs to be bypassed, or a security camera angle that needs to be avoided.
Overall, though, it just seems like someone took a generic stealth-action game engine off the shelf at the supermarket and stapled the Alias gang to it. You sneak, you fight, you execute stealth attacks with cool animations, you pick locks and hack computers, you use gadgets and guns and makeshift weapons and you communicate with handlers back at headquarters. It's all a little too familiar at times.
Combat is a bit of an exercise in random button-mashing, and you can often just ignore the whole stealth aspect of the game altogether, since enemies are easily dispatched through your martial arts kick-assery or the plentiful firearms dropped by foes. It also doesn't help that this sort of stuff was done so well so recently in both Ubisoft's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and EA's 007: Everything or Nothing.
What is good in Alias comes from its ties to the TV show. All of the main characters are voiced by the actors who play them, and the game is faithful to the plot devices and backstory of the series. (As it should be, since the script was written by the show's own writers.) The dialogue is pretty good, the voice acting is strong and it's fun to control a digital Jennifer Garner (oops, Garner-Tilley) through her myriad costume changes, many of which have been seen on the show. Especially when you can pan the camera all around her.
While it doesn't break any new ground in the well-worn stealth-action genre, fans of the TV show, or those perhaps looking for a relatively easy entry into this particular type of game, might want to give it a whirl. The rest of us are probably better off with our dreams of oil-filled swimming pools and unattainable starlets.
Better than Dark Angel but not nearly as good as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV-to-video-game treatment of Alias amounts to a fairly basic stealth-action title that's likely to appeal mainly to fans of the show and/or Jennifer Garner's digitized bum.
