The Best and Worst of Alien Life

<b>Turians (<i>Mass Effect</i>)</b> The Turian is the pinnacle of cool alien design, be it in a video game or even a film or TV show. It’s menacing without being pure evil, strong without being a caricature. (Bioware)

<b>Protoss (<i>Starcraft</i>)</b> This race of ancient supreme beings is unspeakably cool. Even their most basic unit, the zealot, looks like he should be the final boss of a different game, with heavy armor and psi blades which would indicate that to be the case. (Blizzard Entertainment)

<b>Asari (<i>Mass Effect</i>)</b> The Asari are pehaps the counter to the gruff Turians, as all of them are feminine, though the race as a whole is more or less genderless. They can reproduce with each other, or with other species, which is one of the few races in the galaxy who can do so. (Bioware)

<b>Covenant (<i>Halo</i>)</b> Halo‘s Covenant Elites are beasty hunters that resemble a little bit of the aforementioned Protoss with their power armor and light blades. We can overlook their propensity for purple and respect them as one of the cooler video game races. (Microsoft Studios)

<b>Locusts (<i>Gears of War</i>)</b> It’s a bit pointless to have a race of aliens that is the same exact build as your human protagonists, only with a scaly head and grey skin. The vast majority of the time, you might as well be fighting human soldiers, and it’s only when you get up close can you even tell the difference. (Epic Games)

<b>Chimera (<i>Resistanc</i>e)</b> Chimera seem to be to be an exercise in lazy creature design. They’re just a mess of eyes and teeth that are so giant and pointy it wouldn’t even be possible for them to ever close their mouths if they wanted to stop snarling for a minute. (Insomniac Games)

<b>Batarians (<i>Mass Effect</i>)</b> Like the Chimera, the Batarians suffer from having too many facial features, again with a plethora of eyes but also eight nostrils. You could smell the burnt flesh of a Geth raided colony from the next planet over with that kind of sniffing power. But it’s just not worth being horrendously, terribly ugly at all times. No wonder they’re such jerks. (Bioware)

<b>Covenant (<i>Halo</i>)</b> There are so many different types of Covenant in the Halo series that half are good, half are bad. While I might have appreciated Elites and Hunters, Grunts are probably the single stupidest thing in the entire Halo series. (Microsoft Studios)