You’re walking through the cold dark hallways all alone. You have nothing but your wits, a handful of gadgets and a keen survival instinct. As you walk through the dark corridor you hear a loud hiss. Your panic goes into overdrive as you bring up your scanner in a frenzy to see if “it” is nearby. Nothing – scanner is dead. You allow yourself a moment of breath as you realise the hiss came from the opening vent next to you. You stand up from your crouched position – vigour and confidence that “it” is nowhere near. You walk around for a while completing your objective – forgetting where you are and the danger that looms. That is when it starts. CLANK, BANG, CLANK, BANG. You idiot! You forgot to check your scanner. You bring the scanner up to see the green blip making its way through the green net. It’s close and it knows where you are. You are no longer alone. You franticly dash to the nearest locker – hoping that you don’t get it’s attention – meanwhile the thrum is getting louder and more intense. You lean back – not wanting to look. You hear it snarl, or at least you think you heard it snarl – you hope that you heard it snarl, the other noise would spell certain doom. You see it’s black mass stomp past. It stops at the locker, sniffing. It knows you are there! You hold your breath in a vain attempt to hide your presence. He stays there for what is an eternity before he turns to leave. Relived that you may have escaped, you breathe out. HE HEARD YOU! Oh God why didn’t you hold that breath?! With lightning fast agility it turns and rips the locker door off. It grabs you and that’s it. It is the end. Despite the title you are not alone, although you wish you were. This is Alien Isolation
Alien Isolation is the definition of a survival horror game. You are helpless and at your enemy’s mercy. You have no way to fend for yourself and must rely on survival tactics to get through this horror. No longer will you be shooting down waves of Xenomorphs or using your trusty smart gun to track the alien’s position while you hold down on the trigger. All you have that stands between you and certain doom are a handful of defensive tools (such as noise bombs) and hiding spaces to wait in while the Xenomorph creeps and skulks through the area.
For those that do not know what this game is about or are boycotting it after the disastrous Alien Colonial Marines (I don’t blame you), then let me explain. Alien Isolation is a game where you play as the Daughter of Ellen Ripley (Protagonist of the Alien franchise), Amanda Ripley. She is searching for her lost mother fifteen years beforehand. Ellen Ripley, as most of you already know, is drifting through space, lost while in hyper sleep after the events of the first Alien movie - not to be awoken for some time. Suffice to say – you get onto a space station that is in a state of disrepair and is chaotic. What caused this chaos? Well everybody’s favourite alien race, a Xenomorph of course! The Xenomorph has caused havoc and carnage throughout the space station and now it is after you! (Well Amanda Ripley – but you get what I mean). And that is about as much plot as I want to give away less I go into spoiler territory.
So the basic premise is, it is you and a deadly relentless alien. You can’t kill the alien and the alien can definitely kill you. Also you want to know something amazing? It never stops chasing you. After you encounter it, that’s it, the Alien is stuck to you like a piece of bubble gum on your shoe. Sure, it may be searching the other side of the station – but it’s still searching, eventually it will find you and you will need to hide. This notion is refreshingly terrifying. It brings me back to when I was a child playing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Nemesis was brooding monster that you knew was around – and you knew that it would eventually strike. Likewise the alien in this game is a threatening menace, albeit a smarter and deadlier one. In RE3 you got the implication that Nemesis was following you (where in actuality it was just a sequence of staged moments), in Alien Isolation you know the Alien is following you and will not stop. There are other enemies in the game to break up the chase and they work as nice buffers to keep the pace of the game fresh. But the one thing you have to remember is that the alien is still around and if your interactions with the other enemies become loud and messy, you will attract the Alien to your location. This can be used to your advantage as you can lure the alien to come in and deal with those pesky looters (as it pretty much attacks anything that moves and breaths), but then you got to be careful, cos now you have gotten the alien’s attention and getting its attention makes you wish that the game lived up to its name sake.
Every aspect of the design on this game is given love, care and attention. This is the first game (to my knowledge) to pay direct homage to Ridley Scott’s Alien and you can tell that heavy influence is taken. From the art style all the way to the sound design, everything feels like it belongs in that strange 1970’s view of what the future would be – dot matrix computers and all. You can tell that the visual design of this game was laboriously toiled over by the art team and developers. Everything has a sheen to it, as if it is all in place and nothing in the design seems accidental or over looked. Like Ridley Scott’s Alien, there are clear parts in the station that are meant to evoke the Xenomorph physiology. It makes you think that maybe the Xenomorph is standing in the distance, when really it is a stack of boxes with wires hanging around it. Where this game truly shines is in the sound design. Every sound is this game is designed to make you quiver in dread. I cannot tell you the amount of times I cringed at the squeaky locker doors and how it “just so happened” to sound like the loud “alien spotted you” orchestral sting. Or how about the hiss of the vent opening and closing automatically, you cannot tell me that they didn’t intentionally make that so it sounded like the alien hissing. The alien’s stomps fill a sense of terror and dread as they are loud, guttural and just plain un-nerving. Every idle noise in this game is designed to make you wonder if the alien is close by.
The game design and gameplay is, as far as I can tell, near flawless. There are not many bugs, or no real major oversights in mechanics that would de-rail the whole game – mostly it is tight and one of the best horror games I have played since Dead Space, gameplay wise. Most of the weapons and gadgets are balanced and all have their purposes depending on how you want to play the game or get through specific scenarios. There are some issues – but I will get to that when I talk about the cons.
One particular great mechanic is the scanner. This thing is a blessing and a curse. I found myself during the early parts of the game really wanting it. But as soon as I got it, I believe I got even more paranoid than beforehand. First of all the scanner picks up every movement – from the harmless android to the skulking killer wanting to eat your brains. Not only that, but at certain points the scanner leads you to your next objective, with no difference to if it were a moving object. Sometimes you find yourself wondering – is this blip I’m walking to my objective or the alien above me in the vents. This adds another dimensionality to the horror. Add to that the fact that the scanners constant beeps attract attention to those nearby and it is almost a curse in disguise. Another feature with the scanner is the ability to change focus. This was a fantastic idea. Basically when you are looking at the scanner everything in the background blurs slightly and you can press a button to shift focus – this lead to many tense moments when I couldn’t see what the blip on my scanner was due to the focus. The hiding mechanics are also phenomenally great. If the alien suspects you are hiding in a locker or a box you have one chance to convince him other wise and you have to hold your breath and lean back. Problem is, the longer you hold your breath the more health you lose. Eventually when you breathe out, you better hope to hell that the alien is out of hearing range, because that s*** is loud yo!
The negatives are actually not very major in my book – but they should be mentioned none the less. One definite negative is the crafting system in the game, there seems to be an issue where it doesn’t register that you are going in a direction to select the object you are trying to put in the crafting pool. This wouldn’t be such an issue, but crafting is in real time – so no pauses. This is meant to be tense, but just feels a little obnoxious and annoying. The weapon and gadget selection is horrid. I don’t understand why the developers didn’t just go for the map to the D-pad style for quick change weapon and gadgets. As it is, you can only quick change between weapons and not gadgets on the D-pad. The crosshairs are too small. No actually let me amend that, the area to highlight to do an action is too small. When an alien is coming down the corridor, I don’t want to spend five minutes adjusting my crosshairs so it just fits over the handles so I can enter the locker. It takes way too long and can feel like a cheap way to be killed.
Speaking of cheap ways to be killed – there are open vents above you and sometimes the alien can just attack you from them. Luckily, you can tell if you are paying attention and see drool coming down from the open vent. For the most part this mechanic is fine, but there are cheap moments such as when I nearly finished a level, entered a door and BANG the vent above the door I JUST ENTERED had the alien in it. How was I meant to look out for that?! And to make matters worse this frustrates the whole save system. The save system is great – save areas spaced far apart to make you feel more dread as you don’t want to die and start from that point again (no checkpoints in this game). But when you are dealt with cheap deaths like that it adds frustration and tedium – not horror. There are a few other cheap deaths such as some doors taking a long time sometimes to open. There is no discernible difference as far as I can tell between doors that open immediately and others that take a minute to open. I assume this is a loading problem with the 360 (as I played the 360 version). So I’m not going to be too harsh on this point as the system does have its limitations nowadays and considering that this is a current gen game.
Another thing that builds frustration is the lack of direction. You are just put in the middle of a room with a loose outline of where to go and what to do. I almost feel like I stumble on the solutions most times as I have no clue what I am doing. But it does make me use the map more than I normally would – which I guess is a good thing. This brings me to the plot. The plot is not very memorable so far. It is your bog standard trapped on a space station with an evil inside it story, with an alien paint job. Look, it’s serviceable – but there is nothing standout either. Not like Dead Space where there is a mystery interwoven in the narrative. There somewhat is – but it’s nothing that I was begging to know the answer for.
So, my final verdict for this game is that ultimately, I recommend it to people that like this genre of game or think that it sound’s interesting. It is a very fun and challenging game that breaks the mould of monotonous bro-shooters that are prolific in the console market. The fact that this game didn’t have a multiplayer add on tacked on astounds me greatly and tells me that at least that Sega (cos I assume that they got the final call on the features) get that games don’t HAVE to have a multiplayer tacked on. Creative Assembly have seemingly done the impossible and redeemed the idea of an Alien game after the disastrous Colonial Marines. This game gets the highest of praises for me despite its flaws and I praise it just for the fact that it is something different in the mainstream market. It feels like a cool indie horror game with a professional polish. I give it a solid A, teetering close to an A-, on the grading scale. Let me know what you guys think, sound off and tell me your experiences. Also if you enjoyed this review then check out my other writings on CBM. Make sure to click that red thumbs up! Thanks for reading.