4/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Aliens: Alien 2.

System: Arcade Started: March 21, 2024 Ended: March 21, 2024 I played every Alien film arcade game except for this one. Konami at the time was gaining traction thanks to the Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania games. As a way to kickstart the 90's, Konami released the very first Alien Arcade game in 1990, which was two years after the movie premiered. Konami’s Aliens is an underrated gem and still manages to hold up despite its minor flaws. This is a full adaptation of the movie, as you rescue Newt and kill the alien queen. Since this is a 2-player co-op game, Player 1 plays Ellen Ripley while Player 2 controls Corporal Hicks. This game is run-and-gun as you exterminate a wide variety of xenomorphs. There are power-up items that you can use: missiles, three-way projectiles like in Contra, and flamethrowers. Konami changes it up by shifting the player to shoot upwards, slowly turning into Contra. There is even a mode segment such as going into vents and avoiding deadly hot steam, as well as shooting aliens from a moving armored vehicle. I really like the level and boss designs for this game. The levels really capture exactly from the movie with its dark, murky, sci-fi tech industrialism. The Contra style gameplay stood out to me the most as a change of pace and seeing all the awesome looking boss designs. Of course, Konami would use the Contra blueprint, but at least this game does not have one-hit deaths, as you can take a couple of hits before losing a life and the game even rewards you with more hit bars. The Bosses are not from the movie, but they look pretty cool like that one alien variant that surrounds itself with orbs as you try to fire through them. This is far from a perfect arcade game like my personal favorites of X-Men and TMNT: Turtles in Time, and both of those games came out afterwards, so Konami did improve over the decade of the 90s. Both characters you play are slow and can be difficult to maneuver while avoiding enemy projectiles and that is why you are going to die a lot in this game. Also, the majority of your time playing this game is spent shooting while crouching since you will be killing small aliens that require you to crouch-shoot while most Xenomorphs can be shot while you are standing. There is even a boss fight that can change sizes and requires you to shoot in both positions. Konami’s Aliens is still fun with its creative level design and unique looking enemies. This is actually close to being the best Arcade exclusive Alien game, but I still prefer Extermination. Another reason why Aliens was never ported to modern consoles, but it should be, since I could classify this as underrated. Overall, I recommend this.