Area 51

But here again, another fun idea inevitably joins what feels like a game thrown together out of genre spare parts. [May 2005, p.39]

Most of my differences with Duchovny may be personal but nobody would argue with me that his performance in Area 51 is atrocious. He is to videogame voiceovers what Perry Como is to rock and roll.

A solid FPS with a great storyline, it just doesn't bring too much new to the genre, and at times feels very familiar.

There are not nearly enough decent fps—shooters on the PlayStation 2. That’s why Area 51 is a very welcome release on the console and even on the Xbox and pc, both of which have a much better collection of fps-games than the PS2. Midway's Austin studio has produced from a technical and visual point of view one of the PS2’s finest, if not the finest fps-game. [June 2005, p.52]

A good, solid shooter that has a lot going for it but fails to achieve greatness, lacking that often indefinable sparkle that makes for a classic.

Nothing here is original or groundbreaking, and what may seem cool at first quickly gets dull and tedious after about five minutes.

Area 51 is the antithesis of what first person shooter fans want. It is actually a better offline title than it is online.

One of the highlights of Area 51 is definitely the weapons. There’s a very good variety of weapons at your disposal, all of which are standard to most first-person shooters.

It gets off to a promising enough start, but then it stumbles, then trips over its own feet, then chokes on its own vomit, then dies a slow, miserable death.

Area 51 is in no specific way a bad game, it's just an exceptionally dated game. The player's objectives aren't much more evolved than an old Doom or Turok game, and the graphic presentation isn't up to par with the genre's best.

It's a decent, but far from an otherworldly experience. [June 2005, p.74]

Lacking any innovation, the best this game offers has already been done.

Area 51 is entirely without inspiration, an exercise in slick, crowd-pleasing cookie-cutter cliché from the Jerry Bruckheimer school of entertainment manufacture. It is absolutely not bad, almost never broken, and usually a good deal of fun. [July 2005, p.92]

Despite some decent multiplayer and a few neat features, Area 51 is a much less intriguing game than military facility. We wish it were a little more out of this world.