Many theme park enthusiasts were extremely disappointed to see the removal of Magic Kingdom’s very intense Alien Encounter attraction. However, the legend still lives…kind of. DisneyQuest has created a pretty unique attraction loosely based on the now defunct attraction, but while it showed promising signs throughout the attraction, the flashes of greatness were hampered by some glaring flaws in my opinion.
Located on the top floor, Alien Encounter had about a 5-10 minute wait while I was there, which certainly was not bad at all, especially since the ride was being run at half capacity that day. Loading was done pretty efficiently from what I could tell since there was no confusion from what I saw and people seemed to be loaded into their pods pretty quickly. The whole attraction area definitely has a futuristic/sci-fi tone, which certainly is the look and feel Disney should have aimed for. So in that case they succeeded, but what about the ride itself?
The whole premise of the attraction is to travel to an alien culture’s home planet to rescue numerous explorers who have become trapped. While simple, it certainly is effective and serves as a good enough story. I love the whole concept of there being one pilot and three shooters (though I only rode with my dad so there was only one shooter), but there were just so many shortcomings that hampered the whole experience for me. First and foremost is how difficult it is to steer the pod in my opinion. I had so much difficulty piloting it and my dad fared better, but still certainly had a few issues. My other complaint is the graphics, which are certainly way out of date like with Aladdin. At some points the alien’s were so poorly designed that I couldn’t even tell they were aliens until they came very close to wrecking the mission. Despite only having 2 people, we succeeded, but I honestly found the game to lack any real degree of difficulty. Still there’s just something undeniably fun about mindlessly shooting aliens.
After the three great attractions (Pirates, Buzz, and Space Mountain), this is probably the best offering at DisneyQuest. It’s certainly worth giving a shot if you like shooting games, but just don’t go in with expectations that are too lofty since the ride has some glaring shortcomings, most notably steering and the graphics. Fans of the original Alien Encounter certainly should give this attraction a chance since it’s the only remaining representation Disney has of the former attraction.
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