Fever Dreams in Deepest Space, a Review of Alien: Isolation

Hello again Dear Readers,

This time around I'm going to talk about a really great game that came out recently. That game is Alien: Isolation by The Creative Assembly. It's set up as a sequel of sorts to the first Alien movie that was directed by Ridley Scott back in 1979.

I just finished the main campaign the other day and I loved the game to pieces despite a few flaws. This is a game made by fans of the original movie for fans of the original movie. As fan service for Alien fans it succeeds with flying colors. As a horror game it is merely very good. And as a video game in general it has some nits to pick at.

It's kind of a cross between System Shock 2 and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, with a bit of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay sprinkled in for good measure.

Here's the skinny:

Creative Assembly are an English studio recently bought by Sega who are mostly known for their historical reenactment games known as the Total War series. Those are games about marching the armies of historically well known and obscure campaigns across battlefields and watching the fight play out.

I think the History Channel used them once for a series. It was neat.

Creative Assembly have also dabbled in making other types of games, mainly third person action adventure games like 2005's Spartan: Total Warrior (excellent) and 2008's Viking: Battle for Asgard (less excellent, still good). With Alien: Isolation they break new ground once again, this time into the First Person Horror/Adventure genre.

As fan service the game is delightful. It takes place 15 years after the events of the movie Alien. You play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley's daughter, and you're on a mission to find out what happened to your mom.

Working for the Company, Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Amanda and two other Company representatives get called onto a job on a far flung industrial/commercial hub in deep space, a station called Sevastopol which is owned by a rival company called Seegson.

Sevastopol accepted a request to dock from another ship, a mining rig called the Anesidora, which had come to be in possession of the black box flight recorder for a ship called the Nostromo. The same Nostromo from the movie Alien.

Knowing that her mother was last known to be working aboard the Nostromo as warrant officer Amanda, an engineer by trade, jumps at the opportunity to find out new information about what became of her mother who disappeared 15 years ago.

So that's the basic plot setup. As Amanda the player must explore Sevastopol, which is under quarantine lock-down by the time she arrives, and avoid conflict with Sevastopol's human survivor's, homicidal androids and the unknown danger lurking in the ceiling air vents.

The game starts out slow and quiet, and steadily ratchets up the tension and fear level before finally revealing the big bad, the alien itself. The first few hours of the game are a nice jaunt exploring a spooky, abandoned space station wondering if something is going to pop out at you.

Since the game is based on the original movie the art direction reflects that of the original movie. This is what people in the 1970s and 1980s imagined human space colonization to look like: sterile, utilitarian rooms and hallways featuring analog technology designed such that chunky handed workers in space suits could operate it just fine.

From the opening moment of the 20^th Century Fox logo you see the dedication Alien: Isolation's art team have put into capturing the distinct feel of technology of a bygone era. The screen is filtered to look like it's being displayed on an old cathode ray tube monitor with crackling interference dancing across the screen.

It's really quite a convincing effect. The game itself runs with a basic noise filter that makes everything look like an old computer monitor and every aspect of life on Sevastopol reflects this design aesthetic. From the panels of blinking lights and buttons, to the little blue-grey-green computer monitors and all the individual paneling on the walls, ceilings and floors are all made to look like the set of the movie Alien.

Those first couple hours I had just as much fun walking around looking at the environment as I did actually playing the game. Sevastopol has to be one of the most well-realized places I have been transported to in a game and I think this aspect of it alone is almost worth the price of admission all by itself.

I mentioned this game was part Amnesia. In that game, also a First Person Horror/Adventure game, you are constantly having to sneak around and avoid some dreadful monster that is seemingly always stalking you. In this game the monster is the alien, just as dreadful, and about a hundred times as deadly.

Perhaps even too deadly. You see, in Alien: Isolation for the first half of the game whenever the alien spots you that's it. You die. Game over, man. This isn't a shooter even though you do come across a few guns on the Sevastopol.

Instead you have to craft various devices made from materials scrounged from the Sevastopol. You use these devices, like the noisemaker or the molotov cocktail, to either distract the alien or other enemies or fight them off a bit. Eventually you find a flamethrower and this is allows you to confront the alien and scare it off momentarily. There's still no way to kill the alien and if it gets the drop on you it will still kill you very quickly, but the flamethrower is like a temporary get out of jail free card.

That is, as long as you don't run out of flamethrower fuel which is in limited supply.

Around the halfway point the game's plot reaches a kind of crescendo and things change for a while. Instead of being hunted by the alien you have to contend with Sevastopol's homicidal androids who are still running off the main computers quarantine protocols. By this point you have the means to fight off the androids if you wish so the game isn't as much about sneaking about and hiding from danger.

This is kind of the filler part of the game. The plot, while still taking you through various twists and turns, has you running around the Sevastopol performing all kinds of maintenance work getting power restored to various places so you can reach different areas of the station.

After several missions of this you eventually confront the alien again and the game's plot quickly ratchets up to its final crescendo before leaving you with a bit of a cliffhanger.

I mentioned System Shock 2 and Riddick earlier. The game is like System Shock 2 in that it's a scary first person horror game set on an abandoned space station. It's like Riddick in that you can look down and see Amanda's arms and legs during regular gameplay.

Climbing ladders is great, as is performing the maintenance tasks like using the maintenance jack to power up generators. Everything you do in the game happens in first person in real time, so all that time you spend reading computer terminals or fiddling with the access tuner to open a door or whatever is also time the alien and other enemies are spending looking for you.

The game handles tension very well and goes to great lengths to always keep you on edge, either by having some hostile enemy always nearby or just sticking you in an incredibly foreboding atmosphere.

But that's enough talk about what the game does right. Let's turn to what it does wrong.

Mainly, I think the thing it gets wrong the most is its over-reliance on trial-and-error, especially when it comes to the alien. Encounters with the alien, pre-flamethrower, are almost always deadly unless you have a molotov cocktail to scare it off or a flare to toss around the corner and distract it.

Playing the game on hard the alien killed me a lot, a lot more than the androids were able to, and half the time I didn't even see it coming. This kind of thing can be very frustrating, especially if you're not already sold on the game's setting, premise, etc. If you don't already enjoy games like Amnesia you probably won't like this one.

The other thing the game does wrong is it is too long. The could have cut probably 25% of the game's content, either entirely or just by condensing certain missions and plot points down together, and been a lot better off for it. As it is after the first big plot crescendo halfway through, by the end of mission ten, the game kind of drags a bit and you start to wonder if Creative Assembly haven't lost their way.

I was also incredibly disappointed the game featured hostile human opponents simply because they were completely unnecessary. We already have the alien and the androids complicating matters, we don't need anyone else out gunning for us.

But almost right from the start that's what we get. In a situation like the one that's developed on Sevastopol you would think people would come to conclusion that they should be sticking together and not splitting off into little groups who all try to kill each other.

Yet this is exactly what has happened by the time you arrive. In the space of a couple weeks all life on Sevastopol has descended into utter chaos with the Colonial Marshalls, the only semblance of law and order in deep space, barricading themselves in and letting everyone else just tear themselves to pieces over whatever scant resources they have left.

The game explicitly tells you at one point, via the first human character you interact with on Sevastopol, that when the creature started killing everyone they all decided to just split up and go their own way because it was safer that way.

That just strikes me as incredibly silly and a really lame way to justify human antagonists for you to sneak by and shoot at eventually. I guess this game being a Triple A some concessions had to be made somewhere. I imagine the board meeting between the developer and the publisher going something like this:

Creative Assembly: "Hey we have this cool horror game that uses the Alien license and it's really great and scary and atmospheric!"

Sega: "Okay okay, sounds good, just add some guns and people to shoot at and make sure the whole thing lasts at least 20 hours and we'll put it out there."

Creative Assembly: "Ah, okay. Sure."

Maybe that's just me giving Creative Assembly the benefit of the doubt and really Sega was as hands-off as they could be throughout the whole process. I don't know.

Really, even with the limited amount of unnecessary human-to-human combat, it's something of a miracle that the game even exists in the first place. You just don't see the Triple A sector putting stuff like this out there all that much.

Amnesia, for instance, was developed and published by an independent Swedish studio called Frictional Games. At the time that it came out, 2010, the gaming world had only seen games like it from the Penumbra series, also by Frictional Games.

Basically, Frictional Games kind of deserve some of the credit for Alien: Isolation because they've been doing this model of First Person Horror/Adventure game since 2007 with the release of the first Penumbra game. Only now in 2014 is the Triple A industry starting to catch up and try copying their model.

It's a welcome development, if you ask me, even if the results are a little bit mixed.

All complaining aside though I still had an overwhelmingly positive experience with Alien: Isolation. I completed the game on hard and have plans to go back to find all the collectible stuff I missed and get that trophy for getting through the game without dying.

In addition to the main game Isolation also features a Survivor Mode. This is a singleplayer mode where you pick a character, either Amanda or one of three characters from the original movie, and reach the exit of a stage as quickly as possible. Along the way you have a few optional objectives you can complete for more points and at the end your time is posted to a leaderboard for comparison with other players.

Survivor Mode is a neat feature and it's available from the start, though you'll probably want to play the campaign just to familiarize yourself with the game's systems first. And also to experience a very well told story that is basically a sequel to the original Alien.

There is a also a DLC mission that was available with the copy of the game I got, this one called Crew Expendable. This is based on the original movie and you play as either Dallas, Parker or Ripley.

Crew Expendable takes place aboard the Nostromo from the first movie, shortly after the emergence of the alien, and you are tasked with replaying that part of the movie where you have to shut down access to ventilation system and then try to lure the alien into the airlock.

I made it through the first part okay but when it came time for me to crawl through the ventilation system at the bottom of the Nostromo I gave up on it. You have to get from one end to the other, crawling through a maze-like vent system armed with a flamethrower and try to avoid the alien.

Only problem is the alien is practically unavoidable. It's faster than you and hitting it with the flamethrower doesn't seem to do anything to it. I died probably a dozen times or so before I just said Nope.

So I advise avoiding Crew Expendable, unless you want to play the first part that takes place on the upper decks. It's a nice bit of fan service though if you play it after playing the main campaign you've pretty much already seen it all because the Sevastopol is based on the Nostromo from the movie, so the two locations are incredibly similar in appearance.

So that's Alien: Isolation. A very good experience that is marred a bit by some unnecessary combat and padded out a little too much in the second half but otherwise a very good horror game.

The plot takes you through much of the Sevastopol station, a few ships and even a really neat flashback sequence I won't spoil. You even have a few places where you have to suit up and take a spacewalk outside.

The setting is constantly changing like a fever dream and you're always moving towards some objective, returning to previous areas so you can gain access to new ones, all the way looking over your shoulder and keeping your ears open for the tell-tale sounds of the alien crawling around in the ceiling above you.

Play it in the dark with headphones for the optimal experience and see how long you can go without being killed by the alien.

Thanks for reading.