Retro Review: Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold & Planet Strike

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (1993)

In Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, you play the ultimate space bully. You take lunch money from scientists, shoot fat guards and steal gold from corporations. You’re such a terror that some  researchers run in fear, straining their feeble nerd bodies in an attempt to escape from your violent rampage, stopping briefly only to fire weak shots in return.

But, upon further inspection, maybe you’re not such a bully after all. Maybe those scientists deserve  a little punishment for creating those horrible monsters that the corporation plans on unleashing throughout the earth. And those seemingly innocent fat guards have a tendency to shoot you on sight. And I highly doubt all that gold was earned through a wholesome and forthright entrepreneurial spirit.

So how and why exactly does Blake go about administrating some good old-fashioned laser-branded justice? Let’s find out.

Through six missions you’ll traverse ten floors of electrical security fields, mutated monsters and vending machines. Your mission is to stop Dr. Pyrus Goldfire from unleashing alien mutants that would subject the world to some freakish dystopian experiment where alien-human half-breeds (who make The Elephant Man look like George Clooney) walk the earth.

Saving the world from Clayface is a messy job.

Each floor is not only a mass alien/human genocide-fest, but also a frenzied search for colored keys that either let you access the next floor, or open doors that contain other keys that let you open other doors that contain keys that possibly might contain keys that let you progress to the next floor.

Like most FPS PC games, the keys tend to be in the most illogical places, like  hidden in a  room fifteen doors away from the elevator or in some random container amongst stacks of gold (You don’t store your keys in piles of gold? Weirdo. -Ed). You’d think that at least one of the hundreds of guards you shoot would have a key to another level, but they never do. This nuance unveils a rather interesting question: how do the guards go from floor to floor? I’m guessing it has something to do with teleportation technology because the game is set in the future.

Aliens of Gold came out a week before Doom and has the same “shoot everything and proceed to the next level” mentality. While the shooting is similar, Aliens of Gold uses a colorful style to separate itself from Doom. Blake Stone loves using light blues, greens, and reds. If you squint real hard, it looks like a blocky pastel canvas. The visuals give a cool, tranquil effect, but you probably won’t notice it since you’ll be too busy shooting everything.

Apparently, the French use guns in the future.

Put simply, the game plays like your standard early shooter. Enter a room, turn left, shoot stuff, turn right, shoot stuff, enter next room, repeat. Don’t bother trying to look up or down because you can’t. Besides, in Blake Stone, all the action takes place on specific floors that have absolutely no verticalness to them. Not even so much as a step. Apparently, staircases are no longer necessary in the future, a fact I also chalk up to the aforementioned teleportation angle.

As weapons go, you have the standard array of pistol, rifle, machine gun, and rocket launcher. Your default weapon is a silenced laser pistol. In theory, you could go stealthy, but there’s a cool-down between shots that makes stealth sometimes impractical against multiple enemies.

It’s not so much the shooting that makes it fun as the wackiness of it all. The setting, sprites, and atmosphere make it a unique shooter. It also contains the great line: “All weapons are on this floor, get them.” No greater advice has ever been given by any video game.

Blake Stone: Planet Strike (1994)

The sequel to Aliens of Gold suffers from being born in a post-Doom world. It abandons the quirkiness of Aliens of Gold and replaces it for something that feels like a poor man’s Doom.

This time around, you have only one mission: kill Dr. Pyrus Goldfire. You must progress through 20 levels and destroy security cubes in order to destroy the facility’s teleportation abilities. It’s rather backwards that the only way to progress is by both using and destroying teleportation technology. When compared to Aliens of Gold, the entire 20 levels are about the playtime and size of one mission of the original, which makes this feel like more of an expansion pack.

Planet Strike’s fiercest enemy: the barrier.

The layouts of the maps are much smaller and add a lot of unnecessary burdens, specifically, in the form of barriers. Barriers were in Aliens of Gold, but they always had a switch that could disable them. In Planet Strike, some barriers allow you to go one way, but not the other, and there are no visual cues to distinguish which way you can go. Other barriers open after enemies are killed, but only certain parts of the barriers. Yet others actually act as housing for enemies that can be shot. And some of them have no way of being lowered. The rules of the barriers quickly become irrational and illogical, and create unnecessary frustration in a game otherwise about simple traversal.

Planet Strike lacks the distinctive pastel visuals (while squinting) that made Blake Stone a colorfully zany shooter. Instead, we get the dreary grays and browns of Doom; the sprites are even worse. While Aliens of Gold had distinct and striking visuals, Planet Strike has sprites that are half a mess of dark pixels and half directly recycled from Aliens of Gold. Yet it isn’t too big of an issue, as half the time you won’t see them.

Whoever designed this acid dragon was probably on acid.

Another thing Planet Strike takes from Doom is cloaking enemies, but it takes them to the next level. Doom only had one specific unit cloaked, but Planet Strike has at least one cloaked enemy of just about every enemy type. Visually, they are harder to see than their Doom counterparts, which means sometimes you have to kill them by just spraying the room with plasma. Coincidentally, this is how I ended up beating Planet Strike, as it is a much easier game than its predecessor.

Aliens of Gold is where it’s at. The exceptionally distinct visuals and quirky futuristic setting make it a solid old-school shooter. Planet Strike takes all the fun of Aliens and replaces it with poor attempts to be more like Doom. If you get the inclination to play Planet Strike, just go play Doom instead. And if you get the urge to play a great old-fashioned shooter, pick up Aliens of Gold.

You can purchase both Aliens of Gold and Planet Strike for $5.99 each at GOG.com.