Let 'Er Ripley: Our Time With Aliens Vs. Pinball

Zen Studios’ Alien Vs. Pinball pack launched recently, bringing a trio of new tables to its Zen Pinball/Pinball FX platforms. I’ve spent several hours playing around with each one, and as a fan of the Aliens franchise, I’m happy to report that it’s one of the strongest collections that the pinball series has seen yet. Read on for my impressions of each of the three tables, which are based on the Aliens, Alien vs. Predator, and Alien: Isolation properties.

Aliens
I suspect this is where most of us are going to start, considering the popularity of the Aliens name and the fact that it’s first on the list of the newly added tables. If you’re a “save the best for last” kind of player, you might want to skip it – at least temporarily. The Aliens vs. Pinball pack is a great set of tables overall, but this is the clear highlight for me.

Zen Studios has done a solid job over the years in translating licenses to a format that doesn’t necessarily make logical sense. Here, they’ve done some of their best work. The authentic voice samples from the film help create a table that actually manages to capture some of the movie’s tension. You can choose to follow the events from the film’s story chronologically, or pick and choose your favorite missions in whatever order you want. Personally, I got a bigger kick out of following the movie’s flow, starting with finding Newt’s hiding place by shooting lit ramps, sealing up doors by doing the same, and so on. I haven’t made it terribly far into the table, but I’m enjoying some of its subtleties. 

You can upgrade various aspects of your team, such as decreasing the time turrets take to acquire targets or increasing facehugger lock-on effectiveness, which will manifest in missions that you take on. For example, when your turrets spring to life in timed survival missions, where alien targets slowly descend the table, you’ll be thankful when the automated guns help by taking out targets that your ball misses. There’s also a mini table near the top that features the alien queen. She’ll grab the ball and throw it down the playfield at an alarming speed, which took me by surprise.

The only real downer I’ve noticed so far is a minigame where you take control of a speeding APC. You switch lanes using the flipper buttons and try to avoid debris. Zen Studios decided to render the minigame in a semi-realistic diorama format, which seems weird, even for a series that routinely features fully animated characters on otherwise realistic tables. It seems like a perfect fit for a video-mode game, considering how simple it is.

Thankfully, that APC section is a small portion of a larger experience. I imagine that I’ll be spending a lot of time with this table.

Alien Vs. Predator
I adore the Predator, but the Alien Vs. Predator movies have left me a little cold. Fortunately, the cool parts of the creatures have made the transition to this pinball table, while the goofy story stuff takes a backseat to the action. 

I didn’t break out a tape measure, but the AvP table feels much more open than the comparatively claustrophobic Aliens one. Basically, you are a Predator while you play, taking out alien targets and soaking up the admiration of the human narrators – or at least the ones you aren’t skinning for trophies.

The biggest gimmicks that I’ve found so far are a mode where the game takes on the predator’s infrared sight. Human targets are bathed in red and blazing orange, and the aliens remain cloaked in darkness. Fortunately, you can spot the aliens by their motion. There are also a couple of minigames, one where you spin a socketed stone to catch balls that are hurled from several directions, and another where you have to rotate and match symbols before time runs out. They fit the ancient-pyramid theme from the movie if you squint enough, but I wish they could have scrapped the license and just adapted the far-superior Predator 2.

Alien: Isolation
Of the three new tables in the pack, this is the one that took the longest to click with me. I couldn’t figure out why that was, and because of that I ended up spending the most time playing the table. I really liked the Alien: Isolation game, which was set between Alien and Aliens, but its survival-horror gameplay didn’t immediately translate to pinball quite as well as I’d hoped.

The sound design is great, featuring the lo-fi bloops and electronic burps from the source material’s in-game computers, and plenty of guiding narration. There are a lot of cool nods to the stealth gameplay, including sections where you get additional points for hitting the Working Joe android targets in their backs. In spite of the time I’ve dumped into the table, I’m not great at it. I’ve played some of the missions – a stealth section where ramps are blocked by popup guards is particularly clever – but I’m far from mastery.

Miss a ramp during a critical section and the alien will paw at Amanda Ripley for a while, and also take away from a health meter. I haven’t reached a failure state from running out of health, since my third ball drains long before that happens, so I can’t speak to how frustrating it might be when – or even if – you lose because of a character death. I’m definitely going to keep plugging away at it, because while it might not be the shiniest of the three tables, it seems like it may offer the most depth over the long term.