What were you thinking, buying this?
What can I say? Heroes Unlimited is my game. I expected a lot of new material for running alien characters, and probably some background material on the universe. A revised edition of the book has come out since the version I'm reviewing, but word on the grapevine is that there are limited changes between the books.
So, what's up with the book?
The book opens up with a couple of notes on running a galactic campaign. Since the notes take up less than one full page, there naturally isn't a whole lot here that we haven't heard or thought of before.
Second are the expanded rules for making alien characters. This was valuable at the time the book came out, particularly a new random power chart that included all the new abilities from Villians Unlimited and Aliens Unlimited. Unfortunately, everything here has been included in 2nd Edition, so this section is fairly worthless to people who play the new game.
New Rules and Abilities by Power Categories is mainly a source of new toys. A number of new bionic systems were included, along with new spells and new super abilities. The downshot is that most of this material has, once again, been included in Heroes 2nd. Everything's balanced and nicely written, its just for the old game.
Next is Alien Watch Organizations, groups dedicated to finding, helping, or hurting alien lifeforms on Earth. Project Tyche, Project Secure, Triton Industries, Reach Up, and SHOCK all make their first appearances here, featuring much of the same material that was reprinted in Century Station later. With the possible exception of SHOCK, I don't think I've ever felt the need to use any of these groups. Their presence is just too focused on aliens to be of much use in a non-alien focused game.
The next 116 pages is taken up by alien descriptions. Here we see my dislike for official setting information in Heroes take real form. The majority of the aliens are nothing more than a human with an animal head. Every single alien, with a couple of exceptions in the space monster section are humanoids with fur, scales, and a big animal head. There's very little about that sort of creature which shouts out "alien". Granted, Star Trek wasn't much better, but I still want more out of my alien lifeforms. I've seen a few of these creatures make their way into my games, but I usually just ignore space entirely. Watch the preview for the movie Evolution, now those are some aliens. I should also mention that the book was advertised as having Rifts conversion notes. Some were given, but not a single alien species has a base PPE. Even the ones from high magic worlds apparently have no PPE. Generic numbers can be assigned based on Heroes 2nd, but that is of little help to those that don't have that book.
The remainder of the book is filled out with equipment. The majority of it is new weapons and armor, but some vehicles and miscellaneous alien tech is included. Some of the stuff is good, like laser bolas and the cold guns, while others are not so good, like the passage that says that microwave guns do little damage.
Yeah, right, but what about the pretty pictures?
Layout: Same-old, same-old. At least its predictable. A minor downshot is that the alien species are listed alphabetically, rather than organized by sector of the galaxy or by the empires they belong to. This makes finding information on any given group a real bear.
Cover art and interior art are by Breaux. All of it. His style actually seems better suited to a fantasy setting or a proper science fiction game, as opposed to superheroic space fantasy like Aliens Unlimited is. The artwork looks too... realistic. Maybe its the coloring, maybe its the character's facial features, maybe its the shading, I'm not sure. But the artwork just doesn't look like its out of a comic book.
Worth the dough?
The gear is good, as are the expanded alien generation charts if you're running Heroes Revised, but this is another one for the dusty shelves. The lack of convincing alien species, even though more than half the book is spent on them, and the transfer of all the new powers and character generation charts to Heroes 2nd marks this book as unneeded weight in the stack one takes to the gaming table.
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