The Gaming Lycanthrope: April 2016

The title screen perfectly captures the tone of the game.

Developer: Creative Assembly
Publisher: Sega
Version(s): PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4 (reviewed), and Xbox One
Price: $59.99
Release: October 7th, 2014

When it comes to the Alien franchise, I have always been a bigger fan of the original Ridley Scott movie than James Cameron's actionized sequel. Don't get me wrong, both of them are great movies, but I prefer the “slasher movie in space” vibe of the original over the “military bros shooting up aliens” vibe of the sequel. Most video game adaptations set in the Alien universe draw inspiration from the James Cameron movie and most of them are pretty mediocre. 2013's Alien Colonial Marines by Gearbox Software was different, if only due to the fact it was a complete trainwreck that sold itself on false promises and fake gameplay footage, and to this day is one of the biggest shitshows to ever happen in the video game industry.

Aliens Colonial Marines summed up in a single thirty second video.

So when in 2014 developer Creative Assembly revealed its horror game Alien Isolation would take inspiration from the original film rather than the sequel, I was very interested. I played it back in 2014 and remember absolutely loving it and giving it a very positive review in my student newspaper. 2014, however, was also one of the worst years in video game history. So was Alien Isolation merely a mediocre games that felt great at the time when compared to the garbage coming out around it? I recently went back to play it with that and mind and found that it does, for the most part, hold up. However, I do have quite a few problems with it.

You just have to look at a screenshot of Alien Isolation to know it's better then Aliens Colonial Marines.

The story of Alien Isolation is as follows: you are Amanda Ripley, daughter of the sole survivor of the original film's Ellen Ripley, who is drawn to the remote space station of Sevastopol with the knowledge that they have found the flight recorder of her mother's ship and may find closure for her mother's disappearance. When she arrives, she finds that the station has been torn apart by fear of an alien organism that is picking them off one by one. Now trapped on the station, Ripley must find a way to escape while dealing with paranoid human survivors, malfunctioning synthetics, and of course, the alien itself.

Amanda Ripley most certainly takes after her mother.

The plot of Alien Isolation is nothing special. It gets the job done and drives you through the game just fine, but don't expect any big plot twists or anything especially if you are a huge fan of the Aliens franchise. There are likely twists you will see coming from a million miles away even if you're not a huge fan of Alien. However, the writing redeems itself when it comes to subverting clichés that have plagued the Alien franchise for years. Rather than the iconic Weyland-Yutani being the central evil corporation working behind the scenes, their failing competitor Seegson takes the role instead. We also don't have the ally being revealed as an android or the evil executive trying to capture the alien. There are characters that play with those expectations, but thankfully subvert them. The role of antagonist is squarely put on the alien and malfunctioning AI running the station.

Meet your new worst nightmare.

The real narrative achievement of Alien Isolation has to be it's setting of Sevastopol Station. Sevastopol is a wonderfully realized place that feels real and lived in despite being what amounts to a space version of Detroit. Computers files and audio diaries you find throughout the game paint a picture of a once shining beacon of man's rise to the stars reduced to a barely functioning heap of metal floating in a part of space ignored by everyone else. The main things that make Sevastopol so memorable is Alien Isolation's excellent art direction, lighting system, and sound design. Alien Isolation perfectly captures the 1970s view of the future from the original film with vacuum tube computers, cassette tapes, and CRT monitors. The lighting of the station’s many rooms and hallways are always dimly lit or outright malfunctioning, creating a constant sense of unease. Finally, the sound design is simply breathtaking, with every creak of the ship being audible and many sounds designed to make you feel like you are being watched. This finally leads us into the gameplay aspects of Alien Isolation.

Sevastopol Stations deserves to be counted along side the USG Ishimura and Rapture as one of the best video game setting ever.

Sound is the most important aspect of Alien Isolation's game design. Throughout almost the entire game, Ripley is being hunted by the alien, and unlike the cannon fodder it has been reduced in other media adaptations in recent years, this one is an unkillable horror that WILL kill you if it finds you. At first your only tool to help you survive against the alien is a motion tracker that detects movement around you. Every time you hear that tracker beep your heart rate increases, as you know the alien is almost certainly nearby. You can also usually hear the alien crawling around in the vents or prowling the halls long before you see it. The motion tracker gives you an advantage, but the alien can hear it's beep if it's close enough so you also have to be careful when using it; otherwise, it's instant death.

The motion tracker lets you detect enemies movements, but also blurs your vision when using it. It also malfunctions when in tight spaces like vents.

There is more than the alien you have to worry about on Sevastopol. There are small pockets of paranoid human survivors you will have to contend with. Some of the groups will not become hostile unless you provoke them, other might give you a chance to leave before open fire, and others still will just attack on sight. There are also the station's synthetic work force called Working Joes found in certain parts of the station which are often malfunctioning and will attempt to grab you and strangle you to death. You can try to fight off human attackers and Working Joes with a small collection of weapons you fight throughout the game, but you are always better off sneaking around threats as the sound of guns going off will almost certainly draw the attention of the alien. You can potentially trick humans into attacking you and escape a sticking situation while the alien is munching on them instead of you, but it is a risky move and more often than not will result in your death as well. While almost all your weapons are pretty much useless against the alien, you do have a trump card in your arsenal. The Flamethrower is the only weapon in the game that can drive off the alien, but fuel is scarce so it should only be used when absolutely necessary.

The Working Joes move slowly, but are hard to take down, deal a lot of damage if you do catch you, and often appear in groups. So don't underestimate them.

Thankfully, you do eventually get more than a measly motion tracker and a few weapons to help you survive against the alien and the other threats Sevastopol throws at you. Throughout the game you find blueprints and components that let you craft tools that can help put the odds in your favor. Tools like flashbangs can stun humans so you can run past them, EMPs can stun synthetics, and Molotovs can drive away the alien. You also get Noisemakers and Flares that you can use to divert the attention of enemies, including the alien, so you can sneak past unseen. However, the alien in programmed in such a way to adapt to the strategies the player uses. Use a noisemaker to draw alien's attention one too many times and it’ll look for you instead. Hide in a locker too many times, it will start investigating them. Use the flamethrower to drive it away too much, and it’ll relentlessly attack you to make you waste fuel. Combining all of these gameplay variables and enemy types with open levels featuring multiple routes to the same objective makes for a truly excellent core gameplay loop of navigating dangerous gauntlets from one objective to another.

The Flamethrower is the only reliable way to drive off the alien making it the the most precious tool in your arsenal. Fuel is very scarce so use it only if you absolutely have to.

So I have pointed out that the core gameplay loop of Alien Isolation is great, but with mechanics so brutally tough, especially on higher difficulties, you need to focus that into concentrated bursts as not to exhaust the player. Sadly, Alien Isolation suffers from a bad cause of unnecessary padding. Alien Isolation's campaign is about 20 hours long and could probably benefit from having at least 8 hours of that cut. It feels like the developers had a lot of ideas for creative scenarios to put the player in and wanted to put as many in as possible without thinking about how exhausted it would make the player feel. A good example of this padding is a hospital level early in the game. After finishing the area the is an elevator to the beginning of the area is clearly accessible to the player's right, but rather than simply let the area end on a high point, the developers instead force the player to take a detour into the vents towards another area of the station simply to pad out the length. There is also an entire chapter of the game that consists of nothing but walking and doing simple interactions. While the chapter is visually spectacular and important to the story, it’s very tedious to go through on a second playthrough when you just want to experience the game.

The need to find upgrades for your hack tool and blowtorch just feels like arbitrary ways of extending the length of the game then an incentive to thoroughly explore the station.

The feeling of padding the length is also not helped by the manual save system that Alien Isolation has in place. I personally love the manual save system of Alien Isolation as it goes a long way towards increasing the feeling horror and dread as you don't have the security of an automatic checkpoint to fall back on if you die, and you have to be on the lookout for save points which encourages exploration. However, some areas of the game have a critical lack of save points and certain save points are separated by loading screens. So if you die before reaching a save point in a new area, you'll have to wait for the game to reload at your last save point and then wait through another loading screen to get back to the new area you died at. I believe that Creative Assembly has addressed several of these issues; I remember finding more save points than the first time I played in 2014, and the game will reload from the beginning of a new area if you haven't found a save point in that area yet, but I think adding the option for automatic checkpoints wouldn't be a bad idea either so long as you had the option to switch between manual and automatic at will.

When you activate a save station the option to save is always defaulted to no. This makes it very easy to accidentally not save in a panic and screw yourself over. Which is really annoying.

There is more to Alien Isolation then just the campaign. There is also a few cool extra modes that offer concentrated bits of pure gameplay and light story elements that expand upon the experience. There is Survival Mode, which pits you against predetermined threats on themed maps that challenge you to complete objectives in tight time limits to get high scores that are put on online leaderboards. There is Gauntlet Mode, which challenges you to finish three maps in a row without dying. And finally, there is Salvage Mode, which has you choosing between two objectives across several rounds to see how long you can survive. Sadly, the base game only launched with a single survival mode map with all the other modes and maps being DLC, which kind of sucks. There are also two DLC scenarios taken from Ridley Scott's Alien and the fact they were used a preorder incentive is just disgusting, especially because they got the original cast back to record new lines.

It's great they got the original cast to come back to do more Alien stuff, but it's a crying shame that most of it was relegated to preorder DLC.

The last issue I have with Alien Isolation is admittedly a minor nitpick, but it still annoys the hell out of me. There are these items throughout the game that open up new paths like a wrench you can use to take barriers off doors, a blowtorch you can use to burn through metal panels, and a hack tool you can use to open locked doors and terminals. However, there're arbitrary restrictions on how you can use they items and how they are used. The hack tool minigame is fine for the most part, but the fact you keep running into doors that you can't hack without higher level access is really annoying. Same goes for the blowtorch where you have to keep finding more intense fuels to cut through tougher metal. There is also the obsessive number of "immersive" button inputs that really started to annoy me late in the game.

The amount of times I had to press L2 to hold a door handle and then press the Left Stick down to actually open it is frankly ridiculous.

Despite the issues that I have with Alien Isolation, I still really enjoyed the game and still think it was one of the best games to come out of 2014. I don't like the fact that most of its post game content was relegated to DLC, but if you haven't already played Alien Isolation, you can get The Collection version that comes with all the DLC on Steam, PSN, and the Xbox Store for $60. The game also had an update that added two new difficulty modes for free. Novice Mode for beginners who just want to enjoy the experience and Nightmare Mode for masochists that want the ultimate challenge. Alien Isolation is a must for Alien fans, especially if you were burned by Aliens Colonial Marines. It's the Alien experience we deserve. Now let's just hope Sega lets Creative Assembly make a sequel.

This review was written by The Gaming Lycanthrope and Edited by Forma

Link to my preview of Alien Isolation I did for The Lycourier before I played it. Sadly my original review has been lost to the sands of time: http://lycourier.lycoming.edu/2014/10/a-preview-game-review-anticipating.html

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