Dai
Death Scythe
Aliens: Dark Descent
I haven't felt so conflicted about a game since Returnal. In some ways, this may be my favourite game in the franchise. Alien: Isolation was the ultimate Alien simulator, giving the player the experience of being hunted by the xenomorph in all its trauma-inducing terror. As a result it was authentic, riveting, but absolutely not fun. I'm still not sure how I managed to get through that game without having a breakdown.
Alien and Aliens were tonally two very different movies. If Isolation nailed the essence of Alien, Dark Descent does the same for Aliens. It's tense, atmospheric and exciting, but it's not flat-out terrifying, making for a more enjoyable game. As a survival-horror RTS, its overhead viewpoint gives the player just enough abstraction from the marines' plight without sacrificing the atmosphere. Signature moments from the movie are turned into viable gameplay tactics, from keeping a shotgun handy for close encounters to laying down suppressing fire with the incinerators. The visuals, the sound effects, the music, the maze-like locations and the feeling of vulnerability despite all the military hardware are all spot on.
In the early missions, moving slowly and quietly is the order of the day. Make too much noise or fail to consider your surroundings and things can go south within seconds. The xenomorphs move startlingly fast once alerted. Unlike XCOM, additional recruits are hard to come by, and low-level grunts can't even equip the better weapons, so each marine is a valuable resource, making it all the more problematic when a bunch of acid-filled pinatas get up in your grill. I've lost count of how many times I had to resort to reloading a previous checkpoint because I couldn't afford to let my best marines get shredded. Even then, I haven't had a single deployment that didn't end with my whole squad being injured and needing a lengthy stay in medbay. Some end up with persistent mental trauma too, which affects their stats unless they're benched for even longer in the psych ward. The game has a whole system about managing your squad's stress and trauma, rather like the PS2 game of The Thing.
There's a pretty decent story that avoids the usual corporate greed angle in favour of something else. The engaging RTS missions are paired with some XCOM-style base management that adds a nice strategic layer. For the first 10-15 hours of the campaign, I thought this was potential Game of the Year material.
Then it all starts going wrong.
My first problem with it may come down to personal preference, but this game gets way too hard as it progresses, even on the so-called medium difficulty. As the campaign days tick along, the alien infestation level increases. When infestation hits level 3, the game balance feels like it goes out the window. The game is very procedural about the level of threat it throws at you. Restart from the same checkpoint a dozen times (as I've needed to in places), and there's no telling if you'll have to avoid two enemies or a dozen within the first minute. Increasingly the motion tracker gets cluttered with little whistling dots skittering all over the map though, even before getting detected sets them on an active hunt for you. The methodical, satisfying pace that works so well early on is replaced by a near-constant mad dash around the map, eyes locked on the motion tracker most of the time.
The campaign timer gets brutal too. A fixed time limit for completing it gets introduced halfway, and suddenly those lengthy injury recovery times start to look insane. I'm a little over halfway through what's looking to be a 40+ hour game, and I don't see how it would be possible to complete it without cheesing checkpoint reloads like I'm doing.
The other major problem is that the game is full of bugs, and not just the kind with two mouths. The early hours didn't seem too bad, just a few animation bugs here and there, but it gets more serious as the game progresses. There have been a bunch of times where objective markers haven't appeared or I've needed to reset because a character became unresponsive. It's crashed to the PS5 desktop twice too.
It's possible that some of my issues with the difficulty are down to my general lack of experience with RTS, but the game just feels less and less well tuned as it goes on. Annoyingly it doesn't allow you to change the difficulty mid-campaign, so I can't see if I'd prefer the lower setting. I'd be loathe to ditch 25 hours of progress and start over.
Given the relatively budget-ish price it goes for, I'd say it's still worth playing for Aliens fans. The early parts of it are excellent, and you may have better luck with the later parts if you play on low difficulty or are just better at RTS than me. I'd recommend waiting at least another few months for it to get some more patches first though.
I haven't felt so conflicted about a game since Returnal. In some ways, this may be my favourite game in the franchise. Alien: Isolation was the ultimate Alien simulator, giving the player the experience of being hunted by the xenomorph in all its trauma-inducing terror. As a result it was authentic, riveting, but absolutely not fun. I'm still not sure how I managed to get through that game without having a breakdown.
Alien and Aliens were tonally two very different movies. If Isolation nailed the essence of Alien, Dark Descent does the same for Aliens. It's tense, atmospheric and exciting, but it's not flat-out terrifying, making for a more enjoyable game. As a survival-horror RTS, its overhead viewpoint gives the player just enough abstraction from the marines' plight without sacrificing the atmosphere. Signature moments from the movie are turned into viable gameplay tactics, from keeping a shotgun handy for close encounters to laying down suppressing fire with the incinerators. The visuals, the sound effects, the music, the maze-like locations and the feeling of vulnerability despite all the military hardware are all spot on.
In the early missions, moving slowly and quietly is the order of the day. Make too much noise or fail to consider your surroundings and things can go south within seconds. The xenomorphs move startlingly fast once alerted. Unlike XCOM, additional recruits are hard to come by, and low-level grunts can't even equip the better weapons, so each marine is a valuable resource, making it all the more problematic when a bunch of acid-filled pinatas get up in your grill. I've lost count of how many times I had to resort to reloading a previous checkpoint because I couldn't afford to let my best marines get shredded. Even then, I haven't had a single deployment that didn't end with my whole squad being injured and needing a lengthy stay in medbay. Some end up with persistent mental trauma too, which affects their stats unless they're benched for even longer in the psych ward. The game has a whole system about managing your squad's stress and trauma, rather like the PS2 game of The Thing.
There's a pretty decent story that avoids the usual corporate greed angle in favour of something else. The engaging RTS missions are paired with some XCOM-style base management that adds a nice strategic layer. For the first 10-15 hours of the campaign, I thought this was potential Game of the Year material.
Then it all starts going wrong.
My first problem with it may come down to personal preference, but this game gets way too hard as it progresses, even on the so-called medium difficulty. As the campaign days tick along, the alien infestation level increases. When infestation hits level 3, the game balance feels like it goes out the window. The game is very procedural about the level of threat it throws at you. Restart from the same checkpoint a dozen times (as I've needed to in places), and there's no telling if you'll have to avoid two enemies or a dozen within the first minute. Increasingly the motion tracker gets cluttered with little whistling dots skittering all over the map though, even before getting detected sets them on an active hunt for you. The methodical, satisfying pace that works so well early on is replaced by a near-constant mad dash around the map, eyes locked on the motion tracker most of the time.
The campaign timer gets brutal too. A fixed time limit for completing it gets introduced halfway, and suddenly those lengthy injury recovery times start to look insane. I'm a little over halfway through what's looking to be a 40+ hour game, and I don't see how it would be possible to complete it without cheesing checkpoint reloads like I'm doing.
The other major problem is that the game is full of bugs, and not just the kind with two mouths. The early hours didn't seem too bad, just a few animation bugs here and there, but it gets more serious as the game progresses. There have been a bunch of times where objective markers haven't appeared or I've needed to reset because a character became unresponsive. It's crashed to the PS5 desktop twice too.
It's possible that some of my issues with the difficulty are down to my general lack of experience with RTS, but the game just feels less and less well tuned as it goes on. Annoyingly it doesn't allow you to change the difficulty mid-campaign, so I can't see if I'd prefer the lower setting. I'd be loathe to ditch 25 hours of progress and start over.
Given the relatively budget-ish price it goes for, I'd say it's still worth playing for Aliens fans. The early parts of it are excellent, and you may have better luck with the later parts if you play on low difficulty or are just better at RTS than me. I'd recommend waiting at least another few months for it to get some more patches first though.
