Aliens: Dark Descent Review
Aliens: Dark Descent Review
Aliens: Dark Descent finds itself squarely between the tense atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien and the explosive, action focused sequel Aliens by James Cameron. Aliens: Dark Descent is easily one of the best Alien games to ever exist in the long history of the IP.
Immediately, the bar is set high with a cinematic level intro, and because of this the next hour spent in the tutorial feel a little sluggish and the stiff cutscenes don’t help the matter. Unfortunately, there are loads of controls and systems, meaning this feels like a necessary evil.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream
Xenomoprhs have somehow managed to escape containment and now your job is to try and contain the outbreak using RTS mechanics blended with extraction based games and a Darkest Dungeon gameplay loop.
Deploy into a hostile territory, try to accomplish as many goals as possible and hopefully extract with as many marines as you can. The game has a strong risk vs reward aspect, where you always want to attempt just one more objective, but with stress elevating on your marines, supplies dwindling and threats rising, the risk exponentially increases.
This solid mission structure keeps things moving along as most deployments usually take between 30-60 minutes as you have the option to extract any time you want as long as you can get to the extraction point, which is much harder than it sounds.
You will get overwhelmed often and have your squad wiped frequently. Luckily, on the standard difficulty this isn’t permanent and the autosaves are done at the big missions points. This does usually set you back far enough that you can fully change your strategy and try again.
Tension isn’t on the level of Alien Isolation, but for an RTS, it does a great job making some tense moments when you are out of meds, down to side arms, short a member of the squad and then you hear the radar start pinging. This tension is aided by some high quality lighting effects and atmospheric audio to help with immersion.
Game Over, Man
There are some minor things that would make for a better experience including being able to rename your marines fully or even just add nicknames. I found it hard to get attached to any of my squad, in other similar games, losing a member was gutting but here it just felt like another cog in the machine.
The camera also feels slightly limited. Zooming in more would have help in tight rooms and being able to zoom out further would have helped in situations where you need to get your bearings. The game only has two preset zoom levels and a few more presets could have gone a long way.
Finally, considering these are marines and they have seen the worst, they get stressed out easily. You can reduce stress by taking meds or seeing the shrink in between missions but stress also should be affected by positive events during missions. Surviving a xenomorph onslaught or finding the data pad that is needed to accomplish objectives probably would feel great and this should reflect in the mindset of your marine.
Eat This!
Aliens: Dark Descent is the type of game that you hope gets a sequel to refine the solid foundations, as this isn’t a perfect game by any means. There are numerous issues including plenty of visual bugs, janky looking character models, voice lines that get repeated thousands of times, which is par for the RTS course, but this isn’t “Game Over, Man” as the core gameplay is tense, challenging and most importantly, plenty of fun.