Alien: Isolation

Well, I just completed Alien: Isolation, otherwise known as the Alien game the franchise has always deserved.  This is, unsurprisingly, the first time any developer has tried to capture the more tense and claustrophobic nature of the original film.  Instead of being a Colonial Marine mowing down countless Xenos with your Pulse Rifle, you have nearly zero defenses.  Sure Amanda’s got a revolver and a shotgun with which to defend herself, but, for once, the Alien is the nigh indestructible threat it was in the first and third films.  Your only line of defense against the creature is a flamethrower, which only scares it off for a few minutes.  If you don’t happen to have that handy, you better know how to sneak like a champion and in the chance that there’s not a lot to hide behind, you can hide in lockers, crates, under beds or tables.  If you think you’ve got bigger balls than the Alien you can try to take it on with your conventional weapons, but you’ll quick learn, this does nothing but piss it off.

Creative Assembly goes out of their way to make sure that the title monster is as dangerous and intelligent as it was portrayed in the first film, something none of the games and even the later films (sans Alien 3) ever tried to do.  The problem with later installments, especially Aliens, is, while they’re still dangerous, they’ve been neutered to the point of practically being cannon fodder.  Oh sure, the Colonial Marines get their asses handed to them, but the Xenomorphs are nowhere near as dangerous as the drone in the first film.  To be fair, it had to happen, as awesome, brutal fuck you badass as the original Alien was, Cameron would’ve had a hard time making it believable for the marines to survive against not one, but a whole colony of them.

On top of making the Alien a super ultra-dangerous, please don’t screw with this monster of phallic death bringing, Creative Assembly took it a step further and gave their digital Alien some intelligence.  Very rarely am I impressed by a game’s AI, but here I can’t help but be impressed.  It gets to the point that you feel you’re actually being hunted, it adapts and learns from the way you play.  Did you douse it with some fire last time it lunged after you?  Well next time it’ll see you, recognize you’ve got your flamethrower and it’ll jump bank into a vent only to catch you off guard and get you from another angle.  It’ll trick the player into thinking it’s gone and will wait for you right outside of your little hiding spot.  I was constantly impressed throughout the surprisingly lengthy game, by how intelligent the Alien was.

Sound draws it in, so you’ll want to spend most encounters with synthetics or trigger happy survivors as free of conflict as possible.  Or, maybe you’re an asshole and you’d prefer to not sneak around them.  In which case, you can throw a noise maker or really any other equipment you’ve got that makes a great deal of noise and draw the Alien directly to them.  Now you can sit back and watch as the beast slaughters three or four guys, or you can take advantage of the distraction and press forward as the Alien goes about its business.

As impressive as the game is and as awesome as it is that we finally get a game in the spirit of Alien rather than in spirit of Aliens, it’s not without its faults, of which there are many.

For starters, the game is frustratingly long.  I clocked in somewhere around fifteen to eighteen hours.  While I do appreciate finally getting a game, and a licensed one at that, that’s more than six to eight hours in length, Isolation would greatly benefit from cutting some of its content out, especially the later parts, when the game finds every excuse it can to artificially extend itself.  Did you think that was the end?  Nope, you’ve got another couple hours to go.  It gets to the point that you roll your eyes whenever something goes wrong, for the billionth time, requiring you to backtrack to an earlier area or go through a completely new area, just to get to the point you were at forty-five minutes ago.  You take ten steps, only to learn you didn’t take any at all.  

(Light spoilers from this point on)

Once the Alien is removed from the game, at a little above the halfway point, the game loses its momentum, hard.  For starters, a good portion of the game after our great friend’s departure, is a massive action sequence.  Which sounds like a nice change of pace for a title built entirely around tense heart attack inducing stealth sequences.  The game is designed with survival horror in mind.  You have very limited ammunition, even if you spend a good chunk of the game stocking up, you’ll still find yourself with no more than a handful of bullets.  On top of that, Amanda isn’t a trained marksman, so a good majority of her shots aren’t going to land on target unless you wait for the reticule to focus (similar to Crackdown) and then fire.  And while that works, these action sections are unforgiving and one well-placed shot from an enemy can result in instant death.

Suffice to say, I missed Colonial Marines a bit when going through these sections.  The game wasn’t great, neither was the aiming, but your shots generally landed on target.  One extra bit of frustration that rears its ugly head in this section is the fact that you have to manually reload every single bullet for Amanda’s revolver, pressing the reload button doesn’t reload the whole thing, you have to press it all six times.  And while that sounds pretty cool (which it kind of is) if you don’t keep the rhythm that the game likes you’ll stop reloading and you’ll have only two or three bullets loaded in the revolver.  Throughout the entire length of the game, I never could quite figure out the appropriate rhythm.  Sometimes it’d work and other times, she’d stop halfway through and then I’d have to start reloading again.

More annoyingly, after the action section, you head to the core of the station and you’re forced to relieve yourself of all your weapons (save for your cattle prod and your wrench) and just to give you a bigger “fuck you” on top of taking all of your weapons, Creative Assembly thought it would be a good idea to put at least five or six synthetics in the area.  Now something you’ll learn about the synthetics is they take a shit ton of punishment.  Bullets barely do the trick and if you try to get up close and personal with your wrench, they have the reflexes of Superman and they’ll block your attack before you even realize you hit the melee button.  The best course of action when dealing with these fucks is to poke them with your cattle prod, giving them a nice jolt of electricity that stuns them real good, and then wailing on the asshole with your wrench, practically stun locking them.  Well Creative Assembly thought “You know, the normal synthetics are pretty tough and annoying bastards, how’s about we have Ultra Fuck You Synthetics that can take pretty much whatever you throw at them.”

Oh, I have my cattle prod, you’ll think when you first encounter them.  And you’ll fast learn that’s as effective as shooting the Alien in the face.  Okay, I’ve got a pipe bomb, you’ll say.  That won’t even stun them.  Alright, molotov?  Nope, they’ll just keep kicking your ass, only now they’ll do it while aflame.  Okay, EMP mine, this oughta work?  Nope, they’ll just keep on walking.  They absolutely cripple you in this section, which doesn’t sound that bad, considering you’re defenseless pretty much the whole game.  The problem is, it’s a stealth section and there’s just way too many of the fuckers for you to really sneak around them.  After about five or so tries through the section, I finally said fuck it and just ran through it, not caring about whether or not I alerted them.  Thankfully they walk rather than run, so you can just hurriedly solve the puzzles while they lumber after you.  It’s not optimal, but it’s better than trying to play sneaky sneak.

The one weapon that actually works against these guys (even your boss ass, fuck you shotgun is worthless) is a bolt gun that charges up and launches a bolt of death at their face.  Thankfully you do eventually find one and, like the previous synthetics, they become a little easier to deal with.

Now, for the story.  Well, it’s not terrible, but it’s not exactly memorable either.  It’s serviceable, but for the most part, it’s a relatively isolated (hah puns) affair.  There are other characters outside of Amanda, but like a certain engineer in a cool suit, everyone else just kind of fucks off and you do EVERYTHING by yourself.  There’s few interactions outside of the occasional cut-scene or radio communication.  The other characters barely have development outside of: Company Lady, Crazy But Not Crazy Guy, Friendly Android Guy, Angry Military Guy, Pilot Person and Friendly Helpful Smart Guy.  Amanda, while a little more fleshed out, still doesn’t have much room to grow either.  We know she’s stubborn, really loves her mom, is pretty good with mechanics and doesn’t take anyone’s shit.  Outside of that, there’s not much to her.  Which is kind of a letdown.

This is after all inspired more by Alien than it is any of the other films, and if anyone knows Alien, they know that on top of being a super tense movie, the characters are all very fleshed out and the dialogue is so natural it almost seems completely improvisational.  It’s not terrible, like I said it’s passable, but it’s hard to really invest myself or feel bad when a character dies or another sacrifices themselves for me.  The game wants me to feel, but I have nowhere to put the emotions, every death is empty because I just don’t care.  It’s agreeably a small price to pay for a game that at least captures the atmosphere of the original film, but I just wish the writing had more.

To bring some more kinks into the writing (as I mentioned above) they find every reason they can to artificially extend the length of the game.  There is a metric fuck ton of padding in this game in the later hours.  You’re about to escape but first you gotta do some shit and then you gotta go out into space to do some other shit.  Oh, what’s that, an Alien got to you and brought you to the nest?  Oh, guess that’s another thirty minutes of game for you.  What’s that, you ejected the Alien in a space pod?  Guess what, you’re barely more than halfway through.  Have fun doing tedious pointless shit, now with less tension.  It definitely overstays its welcome, but again, I do appreciate the fact that the game actually has some length to it.  Not all of it’s great, but at least I get some bang for my buck.  Fifteen hours, five of which are kind of meh, is still better than paying $60.00 for six hours of shoot bangs. 

(Massive spoilers from this point on if you really care)

Oh, yeah, there’s also the one bit where the game kind of takes a narrative nosedive in the stupid department.  I’m sure you’ve asked yourself by now, why is the Alien only in half of the game?  Well, after realizing it was a terrible idea to kill the Alien at the halfway point, they decided that Weyland Yutani interfered or some shit and there’s actually a whole hive down in the basement, but they were locked down there you see?  So the game takes place thirty-something years before Aliens, and we learn that Weyland Yutani has actually successfully contained a hive on a space station outside of LV-426, yet they couldn’t pull that off when they had a whole fucking facility on the planet?  It’s a twist that’s Colonial Marines “HIX IS TOTALLY ALIVE GUIS!” bad.  The moment you start to really think about it, is the moment it just starts to fall apart.  Not because it’s a bad twist, it’d be fine if this took place after Aliens or Alien 3, but because it’s a twist that contradicts series canon.

Thirty years, thirty years, a dead Amanda and an atmosphere processor later, Weyland couldn’t find the derelict craft, even though we see members of Seegson Co. discovering the craft relatively quickly.  On top of that, as I said above, Weyland managed to contain a small hive of Xenomorphs in what essentially amounts to the basement of a space station owned and operated by a smaller, rival corporation.  Seegson Co. is nowhere near on par with Weyland in terms of technology and thus majority of the tech on Sevastapol is primitive when compared to Weyland.  Yet this outdated piss poor facility that’s falling apart (even before the Alien shows up) manages to contain an entire hive in its core?  How could Weyland manage this on a shit outdated facility, but couldn’t manage this on an ultra-high-tech facility that literally makes an uninhabitable planet habitable? 

(End of spoilers)

Eh, this is sounding a little more negative than I intended it.  Contrary to the way the latter half of this review sounds, Alien: Isolation, is without a doubt the best video game adaptation of the franchise and is an excellent game on its own.  Save for some plot points that’ll really only bother mega fans of the franchise (like me), some weak writing and a frustrating and tedious second half, Alien: Isolation is definitely worth the entry fee.

If you’re looking for proper old school survival horror, complete with manual save points, limited resources, a great deal of item management and a greater emphasis on avoiding combat rather than engaging in it, Alien: Isolation is your game.  I can’t honestly tell you how refreshing it is to put in a survival horror game that actually plays like classic survival horror but with modern sensibilities.  This, to me, is the proper evolution of the genre.  Sure we’ve got our Amnesias, our Slenders and our Outlasts, but those are honestly pure horror games, the things that make survival horror, survival horror are missing from those.  Isolation borrows from the modern pure horror games, but keeps the survival in survival horror.

However, if you don’t like having a health bar, if you dislike having to find and use health manually, if you dislike manual save points, if you dislike the idea of losing a great deal of progress if you haven’t saved in a while, if you absolutely hate item management and think combat should always be the best option; basically if you don’t like old school survival horror, then this game is definitely not for you.

For me, personally, I enjoyed the time I spent with it, in spite of the frustrations and tedium of the latter hours and in spite of some of the bigger liberties they took with canon.  It absolutely captures the spirit and feel of the original film (minus the stronger sexual undertones) and it’s about time we get an Alien game instead of an Aliens one.  Not that Aliens is bad, but you can only do the “space marines fight aliens” thing so many times before it gets boring and before the Xenomorphs themselves go from being the galaxy's greatest threat, to mildly annoying insect things.  It’s the best entry out of all the game spinoffs and I wouldn’t mind seeing Creative Assembly develop some more Alien titles, maybe even an Aliens one, because unlike the developers that came before them (looking at you Gearbox) they actually understand the franchise.  Maybe they can do the Colonial Marines justice.