YMMV / Alpha Prime

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome - On easy, you can go through the whole game while only using the shotgun or Gatling LE, and there's no real reason not to.
• Moment of Awesome: Arnold convincing Olivier that Glomar will destroy him, because Glomar's heart reacts to what the person who touches it is thinking.
• Narm Charm - Paolo. His gratuitous Italian and broken English turn every line into a seemingly unintentional joke, but it plays really well off Arnold's attitude.
• Scrappy Mechanic: There are cutscenes almost literally every five minutes, shattering the game's pacing. The only saving grace is that they're all skippable.
• So Bad, It's Good - The game wasn't reviewed very well and it has many detractors, but some of its negative qualities, such as the awkward script and the plot's straight-faced focus on Inherently Funny Words like hubbardium and Glomar, can easily wrap around to making it enjoyable through the snark bait factor. When paired with fairly solid, standard FPS gameplay that was compared favorably to its contemporaries, it's not hard to find ways to enjoy the game despite, or perhaps because of, its faults. Even the enemies' Improbable Aiming Skills can be enjoyed if you can laugh at the unlikely and unfair ways you were just killed, or if you're looking for a challenge.
• Spiritual Adaptation - It's not obvious because it doesn't have any of the Body Horror that the franchise is famous for, but Alpha Prime takes a lot of notes from the Alien movies.
  • In general, like the first movie, you have the concept of a MegaCorp referred to primarily as "the Company" risking everyday, trucker-like miners in order to reach some unique and powerful alien force that transforms the land around it.
  • The presence of the marines and Arnold warning Paolo about their goal of eliminating all witnesses is similar to Ripley's warnings at the end of Alien 3, with Paolo even dying somewhat like Aaron, being shot by an underling without orders when he attempts to make a move against them.
  • Like the first two movies, the threat of what is actively trying to kill the heroes is arguably less dangerous to them than The Mole secretly working for the Company who set them up to begin with.
  • The robots on Alpha Prime have gone as insane as the people, which is much less explained than in Alien, and even the sane people seem to have a quasi-religious thing going on with Glomar, like the prisoners in Alien 3.
  • Despite being a fast-paced shooter, it's a relatively hard sci-fi with kinetic weapons, no other alien life, and even intra-solar system distance space travel seeming to be primarily done with cryogenics (with a single reference to a teleport to Earth being said sarcastically), which wouldn't mean much on its own, but fits with the rest of the elements.
  • The architecture for the ships and the mining station resemble the design of the structures from the Alien franchise, with the elevators in particular matching the one from the end of Aliens.
  • Arnold dies keeping the alien force from the Company, just like Ripley, with his ambiguous fate in the Sequel Hook ending potentially setting up an Alien: Resurrection-like situation.
• Values Resonance: Alpha Prime was way ahead of its time in depicting male and female characters who were supposed to be middle-aged, working class folks as actually looking like middle-aged, working class folks, instead of like youthful Central Casting models or stylized Fortnite-esque dolls. From the late 10's onwards many AAA games have started to standardize this more realistic approach to character design for purposes of realism/verisimilitude, including major games like Spider-Man (PS4), Rage 2, Anthem, The Outer Worlds, Returnal, the The Last of Us remake, and the Dead Space (Remake).

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