Synopsis:
Drop into the gripping journey of Aliens: Dark Descent, a squad-based, single-player action game in the iconic Alien franchise. Lead your soldiers in real-time to stop a new and terrifying kind of Xenomorph outbreak on Planet Lethe.
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Reviewed on: PC (Ryzen 5 2600, RTX 2070 Super, 32GB DDR4), ASUS ROG Ally
Also available for:
Cast: Jared Zeus, Julianna Kurokawa, Ashleigh Haddad, Cavin Cornwall, Dev Joshi, Glenn Wrage, Isaura Barbe-Brown, Jennifer Armour, Joseph Balderrama, Lucy Newman-Williams, Mike Bodie, Michelle Asante, Nathan Osgood
Developer: Tindalos Interactive
Creative Director: Romain Clavier
Art Director: Edouard Boccard, Sergey Kritskiy
Lead Game & Level Designer: Tristan Dalvier
Lead Game Designer: Clement Seurat
Technical Director: Dimitri Chambonneau
The Alien franchise has had a bad run in video games, to the point a new Aliens game release has been a bit of a joke. Aliens: Dark Descent, however, isn’t a joke. The real-time tragedy genre wouldn’t be the one I’d pick when you mention the franchise, but this game is, for the most part, an edge-of-your-seat boiler making every move and decision count with Xenomorphs creeping around every corner. The only thing holding Dark Descent back from a wholehearted recommendation right now is a plethora of bugs and game-breaking issues you may or may not encounter.
Think XCOM combined with Desperados or Shadow Tactics with a survival horror flavour, and that’s Aliens: Dark Descent. However, the game is focused on squad-based decisions, which makes for a blessing and a curse. You move the squad as one, tell them to get behind cover as one, and the AI does the rest. Your marines will fire upon enemies once spotted, move around objects to stay in as constant movement as possible, and it’s up to you to make all the decisions in between.
When spotted by a Xenomorph, you can click backwards to make your team back up slowly while they’ll still fire at the enemy charging at them. Double-click if you want to run, but you can’t shoot and run. Amongst all the movement decisions and map control you’ll need to have, there are the commands you can give your squad, which will use one CP (command point). These start as firing your shotgun, firing a grenade off into a clump of enemies, and placing tracker beacons. As the game progresses, you’ll unlock more guns, silently shoot an enemy in the distance, use an RPG, arrange a bombardment attach, and more. The game defaults pressing the space bar to upon this menu and slow down time, but you can flick it to stop time completed if you want a more standardised tactical experience.
You don’t want to engage in combat constantly, even if you are a squad of Marines. A bar at the right-hand side of the screen will let you know the current difficulty of the Aliens and warn of incoming mass attacks. The more you fight, the more that bar will rise and the more complex the levels become. There are no extra rewards for being as stealthy or loud as possible on missions to push players towards a particular play style. It’s simply a difficulty thing.
When you want to be stealthy, the squad controls can become somewhat limiting. As nice as it is to have a unit always move as one, sometimes you’d like to sneak one unit off to place distraction, but you can’t do that and instead have to move as the clumsy, often loud squad. If you put your team behind cover and choose to place a turret off to the side, a marine will separate from the group to complete the task, but they’ll run back to where the rest of the squad is as soon as they finish it.
What was most annoying about attempting to sneak my way through bases and planet surfaces slowly was the need for the game’s AI to consistently yell out commands: “Double time! Move, move!” and “Come on, you slugs!” Being barked what feels like every 15-30 seconds at minimum becomes grating unless you want to go into the settings and turn voice lines off completely. But why are they yelling this anyway? I’m moving slowly, un-noticed through a base overgrown by Xenomorphs, attracted to sound, and it’s “double time” I have to hear over and over.
Aside from the annoying voice lines. Or most evident when they’re taking a break. Moving amidst the abounded space stations, planet surfaces, and underground bunkers is tense and thrilling. You must constantly watch the Aliens’ famous tracker at the bottom of the screen and move carefully to avoid as many Aliens as possible. It’s tense and makes each mission feel like a mini Aliens movie — when the pacing is right.
Handheld PC – How does it run?
I played a few hours of Aliens: Dark Descent on my ASUS ROG Ally and found it to run just as well as on my PC. You do have to use analog sticks for controlling the game, which is going to be a similar experience to those playing on consoles. However, unless you want to plug in a mouse and keyboard, which will be the optimal way to play the game. That said, there is something to be said about playing this horror game while curled up under the covers at night.
The downside of the game’s rising Alien difficulty system is that if you play guns-blazing or set off a few too many Aliens towards the end of a mission, they can become frustratingly difficult to complete. Once you read the top tier of Alien anger, you’ll be swarmed by hoards where the only hope of survival is with you back to a wall and suppressive fire sending Aliens into a kill-line between turrets. Movement becomes ridiculous at this stage, and ignoring enemies, planning for their movement, and sneaking around is impossible. Instead, it often becomes a hectic pot-luck run to an elevator or escapes via vehicle to end the horrors.
You’ve also got to deal with your marines raising paranoia, health, ammo and managing your resources. As you encounter more enemies, your marines will become more and more scared, missing shots and not reacting on time. A rest can reset this, but you’ll need to weld a door shut, which also saves your game. But welding a door shut uses the same resource you’ll need to often hack into computers to progress missions, making it hard to move without searching for supplies, thus leading to more chances with enemies. And so the circle goes.
You’ll encounter secondary missions on the same map as you complete most primary missions. Completing those can offer research to help you in your mission, but it also means you’ll probably run out of supplies and wear your marines down and be unable to complete all the objectives in one sitting. Thankfully you can escape back to your base camp, a crashed ship, the USS Otago, where you can send marines to a medic, send others to train, build better weapons and experience the story cutscenes between missions.
When not in a mission, you’ll be controlling Maeko Hayes, a Weyland-Yutani administrator who oversees most in-game decisions, alongside Jonas Harper, a sergeant who accompanies squads to the planet surface but stays in the vehicle for pickup and support calls. The story here is basic Alien-world stuff, but the driving human element between Maeko and, in particular, Jonas at the backend of the campaign was surprising.
Aliens: Dark Descent has been a huge surprise for me. And maybe a couple of patches down the road, one of the best horror and tactics games of the year, but there’s a big warning for Aliens: Dark Descent: it has a lot of bugs. Most of them are dismissable small clean-up stuff I could ignore and oddities I wouldn’t care to note, but the amount of in-game crashes and weird errors that soft-locked me out of a level until re-loading a save is simply unacceptable and the sole reasons I’d say hold off on buying this until at least a few weeks from now once it’s sure to be fixed. I haven’t even finished the game, as the level I’m in consistently crashes when I try to get into an elevator. I took to watching the last two missions of the game on Youtube so I could see the narrative through to its conclusion. A quick scan of the Steam forums and these issues are hit and miss. Players praising the game, complaining about the AI voice lines, and then others hitting similar issues to me, and some only a couple missions into the game. Another bug I hit involved the game not allowing my squad to interact with a mission objective, which I managed to find my way around involved re-loading a save from nearly an hour prior, which isn’t acceptable.
Aliens: Dark Descent is an excellent Aliens game, and I hope it’s patched quickly to address the issues some players like myself are running into so I can wholeheartedly recommend it to fans. Because what’s here is some of the tensest Aliens action I’ve played in a game, with a surprisingly exciting narrative to pull it all together.
Note: I will be scoring the game lower because of my issues. I hope to edit this with a slightly higher score if the bugs are fixed, but the game has some caveats for now.
