[Note: an editorial addition to the review was added by the reviewer on 11/14/14 after it’s initial posting]
During this festive time of the year if you are looking for something fun and pleasant to put in someone’s stocking, you might not want to get the following game. But if you want to terrify and traumatize the ones you love then Alien: Isolation is a must buy this holiday season! The team at Creative Assembly have made a true survival horror game and the Alien game that fans of the film series have been waiting for. This game hearkens back to the original Ridley Scott classic film, Alien, so there are no space marines, no power loaders. What is in Isolation is a space station gone to hell and a single solitary, highly intelligent and deadly alien looking to make you it’s dinner. You play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, who is looking to find out what happened to her mother 15 years after the ship Ellen was on, the Nostromo, and the crew disappeared. The company that employed the Nostromo has received word that the flight recorder for the lost vessel was discovered and is on the station, Sevastopol. Amanda joins a crew sent to retrieve the black box but when they get to the station they arrive to complete chaos being created by a very deadly xenomorph. This game is truly the embodiment of outwit, outlast, and survive!
Pros:
- Highly intense, scary, claustrophobic, cinematic…those are just some of the words to describe this game. They embody exactly what you want in a survival horror game.
- Highly detailed environments, the CA team did a fantastic job of recreating the look of the 1979 film. “LoFi-SciFi” is the phrase they coined for the visuals of the game and it’s an accurate description. The alien model looks AMAZING! They captured H.R.Geiger’s design perfectly!
- The Alien AI is VERY smart! You can not follow the same path or behave the same way when the Alien is stalking you, it will not do the same thing twice. This makes you as the player really think about how to reach your objectives keeping every mission feeling fresh and it forces you to creep around every corner looking out for the alien.
- You are not a solider which means that most of your “weapons” are meant to be more of a distraction to divert an enemy’s attention away from you. You do get two types of guns in the game but ammo for them are scarce and they are not effective against 2 out of the 3 enemy types (humans, androids, and the alien) you encounter. Again this game sticks to the true staples of a survival horror game. Also the alien is a one hit killer, bullets don’t do crap to him so you must try to avoid him as much as possible. Fire is the only thing that scares the alien a bit but it is not going to protect you all the time.
- The game story does have you progress in a semi linear fashion but as you progress and gain new tools you can go back into previous areas to open them up. You could essentially free roam at certain points in the game.
- The bonus content, Crew: Expendable & Last Survivor is a fantastic edition to the game. Not only do you get to relive two of the most terrifying scenes in the original movie, all voiced by the original actors but you also get to play as Ellen Frickin’ Ripley who is played once again by Sigourney Frickin’ Weaver!!! How awesome is that?!
Cons:
- Since the alien is very intelligent YOU WILL DIE, A LOT! The first time time you get killed by the alien in any encounter you are usually screaming because it’s likely a surprise attack, but when you replay from your last save and you die several more times the encounters with the alien become less scary and instead become more frustrating.
- This game is long, usually that’s a good thing especially for a game that is single player only but a 15 hour minimum campaign may be a bit much for some gamers. Especially if you die repeatedly you will will get frustrated to the point of not playing it for a while, I know I did at one point.
- Despite being a very pretty game to look at I did encounter a couple of glitches like guns floating in the air after a human enemy died, I’ve also seen the alien glitch on occasion. None of the glitches are game breaking but they sometimes take you out the the game for a brief moment. Also of note the cut scene video stuttered a lot, while actual gameplay ran very smooth which was very odd. Hopefully a patch gets released to fix this.
- The map in the pause screen can be quite unhelpful, even after you find map terminals to expand the new areas you discover they are sometimes still not very detailed. I’ve gotten lost several times despite having all of the areas revealed on the map only to be mauled to death by the alien because I didn’t know where I was going, it was quite annoying.
Despite a couple of cons, I really have enjoyed playing Alien: Isolation. This is everything I was hoping for in a survival horror game and in an Alien game. The source material is given much respect in this game and even expands upon the universe that Ridley Scott created. Alien: Isolation is a beautifully terrifying, challenging and satisfying game that fans of survival horror games should have in their collection! If you want to see just a taste of the scares that the Bifuteki crew encountered while playing the game check out the video below. Alien: Isolation is available now for the PS3, PS4, XBOX 360, XBOX One, and PC.
