Alien Arsenal

By Danny Chihdo

Appropriately enough for a game that began as a megahit arcade light-gun shooter in 1995, Area 51 is bristling with weaponry with which to cut down hordes of mutants, aliens, clones, and anything else that government conspiracy theories might be expected to dish out.

You'll need those guns as well as your trusty scanner against the hordes … and a few pointers couldn't hurt, either …

The pistol is pinpoint-accurate.

Terrestrial Guns and Extraterrestrial Weapons
As a highly trained HAZMAT operative, Ethan Cole is trained in the use of a number of advanced firearms and high-tech gizmos that help him take down threats. Along the way, he'll also pick up a few tools that aren't in any training manual.

M-11 "Scorpion" Pistol
Your basic sidearm comes complete with a mounted flashlight, eight-shot clips, and highly accurate sight that makes it not quite a replacement for the sniper rifle, but rather a handy alternative for getting those all-important headshots. Imagine if Bungie had powered up the old Halo®: Combat Evolved pistol for Halo® 2 instead of powering it down, and you get the idea.

Just make sure to pull the left trigger first for dead-eye targeting. This weapon cannot be dual-wielded.

The XM-32 is your "old reliable."

XM-32 "Viper" Assault Rifle
This is another weapon that invites the Halo comparison and comes out favorably. This is your main machine gun, with a standard flashlight, medium-level damage and range, a punishing rate of fire, and fat 30-shot clips.

Target with the sights and the scope simultaneously. If you're dual-wielding, you'll dish out a ridiculous amount of bullets. This should be your default weapon for unexpected situations.

One shotgun? Good. Two shotguns? Awesome.

M-170 "Hammer" Combat Shotgun
Ah, what would Area 51 be without a shotgun, just like old times? This model is brutally effective at close range, especially against mutants. It's slightly less effective against armored BlackOps troops, but they still go boom up close.

When dual-wielding the shotgun, be careful that you don't run out of ammo too soon, if you don't have room to back away and reload. You can't reload while dual-wielding, so you might get a couple of powerful shots before the second weapon is exhausted and auto-reloading kicks in. You don't want to be stuck reloading in a firefight.

SR-125 "Wraith" Special Purpose Rifle
Area 51's excellent sniper rifle appears a few levels into the game and features two sharp zoom modes keyed to the left trigger. There are a surprising number of big, cavernous spaces down in ol' Area 51, and the SR-125 will let you get through them alive.

Even when you're out of ammo, you can still use the zoom feature to aim a precise headshot. Then, switch to the pistol or the BBG (if you've gotten it at that point) to finish off the enemy.

Sniping is a special purpose, right?

BBG
This alien-designed weapon is not only deadly, but also just plain fun. The weapon fires energy particles that stick to organic objects and reflects off of inorganic ones. In other words, it kills living enemies and bounces off the wall.

The alternate fire (left trigger) mode actually lets you target a bounced shot accurately by showing you the path the projectile will take and whether it's going to hit what you eventually want to hit. It holds 50 shots and cannot be dual-wielded.

Meson Cannon
By now, you've probably noticed that the human weapons we've described are lacking the first-person shooter (FPS) staple—there's no rocket launcher or grenade launcher. Well, here's your answer, in the form of a powerful alien weapon that shoots what look like little super-novas (complete with a cool gravity-lens effect).

This weapon is capable of taking out several enemies at once, and by the time you find it, you're going to need it. However, you should note that the reload is slow and damage yield insanely high, and you can only hold four shots at a time. There's no dual-wielding with this one either, but it's unnecessary.

Grenades and Gadgets
Just because there's no launcher, of course, doesn't mean there are no grenades at all.Area 51 includes two flavors as well as a nifty tricorder-like wrist scanner.

AN/PEQ-61 "Quick Fix" Scanner
This all-purpose gadget is the tool that Ethan Cole uses to uncover the many secrets and layers of conspiracy that reside at the heart of the Area 51 story. You equip it like a weapon (hit Y or the black button to switch weapons) and then just aim it at whatever you want to analyze and pull the trigger. You can scan almost anything in the game, and if something is unscannable you'll get an air sample instead.

Some objects hold special information that you can view in the Databank and Secrets screens from the main menu, including dossiers covering the aliens' involvement in historical events, both recent and not so recent. (Case in point? It seems the grays had a hand not only in the JFK assassination, but that they were also behind the anthrax scare of 2001. See? Up to date!)

Sometimes, scanning an object is key to reaching an objective, and sometimes it's just fun and informative. Keep your eyes peeled for the tell-tale frames that pop up around scannable objects, and be sure to read up in the databanks to get a handle on the huge story being told here.

Scanning for crucial (and kinda gross) clues.

M-25 Grenade
The standard grenade you'll start the game with has a powerful blast radius that will serve you well against groups. The grenades are set to explode on a two-second delay if they hit an inorganic surface (like the wall or the floor), but they will blow up on contact if they hit organic material (and remember from our earlier science lesson that "organic" means "bad guys").

XM-197 "Jumpin' Bean" Experimental Grenade
The so-called "JB grenade" is an explosive derived from back-engineered alien technology. It causes a "graviton-plasma" explosion that sort of sucks in enemies that are close before knocking them flat (and dead). At one point in the game, you'll find a secret that unlocks this grenade's "expert" mode, which makes the grenade's gravity-whatsit hone in on the enemy like a locked-on rocket. And that is very, very handy when facing hordes like the ones you'll see in Area 51 …