Alien: Isolation Review (PC)

Alien: Isolation is the game that all Alien fans have been eagerly waiting for, the one game that promises an experience faithful to the original source material instead of getting lost in senseless action and power fantasy.

Previous entries in the Alien franchise usually entailed some sort of heroic saga, where even when you were alone and stranded, you could still mow down wave after wave of assailants.

Not that the Alien versus Predator series is bad or anything. I can distinctly remember how stressful it was to look at an incoming blip on the motion detector while staring down at an empty corridor, but a game that offers a truly horrific experience, one where you’re not the one with the upper hand, has been sorely missing from the overall Alien gaming landscape.

Up to now, you were pretty much always the hunter, as no matter what twists your current mission threw at you, you were always the one with the biggest body count. In Alien: Isolation, you’re merely trying to escape in one piece.

Story

You play the role of Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley, the protagonist of the 1978 Alien movie. The action is set fifteen years after the events in Ridley Scott’s film, when Amanda suddenly gets an opportunity to discover what happened to her mother and get some closure.

You embark on a journey to the Sevastopol space station, which is currently being decommissioned and in all kinds of disarray, after you learn that the flight recorder of the Nostromo, the long-lost ship carrying your mother, has been discovered there.

Of course, as you reach the Sevastopol, you see that something is not quite right with the station, and as your landing mission goes south, you find yourself stranded on the ruined metal behemoth.

The abandoned space city is a labyrinth of claustrophobic corridors and ventilation shafts, in a severe state of disrepair, with power outages, flickering lights, malfunctioning doors, and collapsed passages, but you soon find that the numerous hazards threatening your life in the bowels of the Sevastopol are only the tip of the iceberg.

Since the station was being decommissioned, everyone was busily trying to scavenge whatever they could, when some mysterious circumstances led to the station being put in emergency lockdown, with its population divided, stranded, and carefully scurrying around the ship, doing their best to survive until some unlikely savior found them.

This means that pretty much everyone you will run into will be hostile and will try to shoot you dead simply on account of not being part of their group, which means that you’re pretty much on your own throughout the entire adventure.

The lighting and particle effects are great

Gameplay

Any good survival game also has a crafting system for you to make use of, and judiciously exploiting the limited resources at your disposal is one of the core mechanics of Alien: Isolation.

Fortunately, thanks to your background as an engineer, crafting makes sense lore-wise, and the precarious condition of everything around you turns gathering scrap and creating makeshift utensils into a natural gameplay extension.

You start off slowly making your way through narrow corridors and ventilation shafts, trying to establish contact with your ship, and you gradually get more and more involved in the station’s ongoing decay.

The few human survivors band together in groups that shoot strangers on sight, and you stumble upon a myriad of logs and recordings explaining what went down, fleshing out the world you’re navigating.

A log you find early on, from the leader of a small community, the sole survivor of another such group, stressing the importance of the group sticking together, respecting the guidelines and showing no mercy to strangers, paints a picture of an unforgiving reality where you can’t trust anyone you don’t know, and offers a context for the seemingly psychopathic behavior of almost all humans you run into.

But although other people will shoot you on sight or will only offer you a very limited window to get away with your life and the station’s synthetic workers, quite a hassle to “pacify,” also seem to have grown an appetite for murder, your real enemy is the Xenomorph.

Hearing the swift and deadly beast thumping in a nearby air vent, hearing it sniffing for you while you’re hiding in a locker or under a desk will fill you with dread, especially since your weapons don’t really work on it.

Hiding all the time makes you feel like a Hobbit

Sure, your flamer and explosives will buy you a few seconds of respite, scaring it away, but it’s a fight you can never win. Your best bet is to try to outsmart it and avoid it, which is not as easy as it sounds.

The scares are generally due to steadily built up suspense, ominous music, and sound effects hinting at the nearby presence of your lethal foe, and the delivery is thoroughly unsettling.

You can think yourself safe, knock over a chair, see the Xenomorph stop for a second and then carry on, going into a nearby room, let out a sigh of relief, get out of cover, only for it to return running for you a moment later.

Its movement isn’t scripted in the traditional sense, where you would identify its patrol pattern and then easily and conveniently circumvent it. Instead, it behaves unpredictably and it gives the impression that it’s actively and intelligently hunting for you and other human survivors.

Of course, this will also create some frustrating moments when you will feel that it’s a bit unfair and pointless to get punished without doing anything wrong, to just lose the game out of the blue, and those unfortunate occurrences will go hand in hand with the other “gotcha” moments, bringing the overall experience down a notch.

For the most part, there will be enough variety so that you don’t get bored of doing the same things over and over, with things being switched up enough to provide a fresh experience from time to time.

In addition to this, there will be a lot of times when you will just wander around the station, trying to find the one thing you missed in order to push the story forward, and there will also be times when you will backtrack a lot in order to open some previously inaccessible doors that required you to find a special tool such as a plasma cutter in order to get them open.

The first encounter with the Xenomorph is brief but intense

Fortunately, most of those instances are avoidable, and they’re meant mostly for hardcore fans who want to collect everything and find every last recording from the Nostromo and the station’s survivors, presumably on their second playthrough on hard mode, where the Xenomorph is even more unforgiving and alert.

You can, however, use your stalker to your advantage, as it will also be attracted by the noise other inhabitants of the station produce, which means that you can employ it as your own personal bodyguard, letting it dispose of the people in your way and then patiently waiting for it to go before moving on.

The one thing you have to always remember is that stealth is your best friend. Whether you’re trying to avoid a bloodbath at the hands of your fellow men, a swift demise impaled on the Xenomorph’s tail, or a loving smothering from one of the malfunctioning Working Joes, delivered while staring into your soul with those eerie, glowing blank eyes, making your way slowly and discreetly is always the best choice.

The handful of weapons you find on the Sevastopol and some of the stuff you can craft are there as more of a last resort or for creating a distraction, instead of the bread and butter of the adventure. They mainly work on humans, androids take a lot of effort to take down, and the alien beast is impervious to your devices.

The overall design is faithful to the first film's aesthetic

Sound and visuals

The first thing that pops right out when you first enter the game is the painstaking attention to detail that The Creative Assembly, Alien: Isolation’s developer, exercised over the course of putting the game together.

The art direction is clearly influenced by the creative vision of the original film, from the narrow spaces and pronounced industrial installation vibe of the innards of the space station to the rudimentary computers and electronic devices, feeling more like the retrofuturistic technology of old-school cyberpunk novels than the more clean-cut, advanced designs of more modern science fiction creations.

Everything, from telephone receivers to whirring, chunky electronics with lo-fi displays evokes a world built around functional and cheap parts, where only the most basic of needs are deemed worthy of servicing and where the futuristic optimism of franchises such as Star Trek are ignored in favor of much more pressing concerns.

The graphics look great and function as a brilliant mood-setter, from the sweat dripping on non-playable characters’ faces to the smoke and fog effects, all having a cinematic and immersive quality to them that greatly enhances the entire experience.

The ubiquitous graffiti on the walls of the derelict space city does a very good job suggesting the anarchy that ruled the station during its final days, and you can tell that everything has been put together with the purpose of delivering an engrossing story and oozing atmosphere.

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The music and ambient sound design are also as brilliantly realized as the visual aspect of Alien: Isolation, with tense chords punctuating the imminence of your primary enemy discovering you, with things feeling very, very creepy from music and sound alone, before anything is even remotely close to showing up on your screen.

The atmospheric sound design is marvelous, from the static on recordings to steam spewing from cracked pipes and electrical discharges constantly reminding you of the perils waiting just around the corner, but where the sound design really shines is when it comes to your vicious stalker.

Hearing the loud thumps of the Xenomorph casually stomping around you, hiding in a nearby air vent, will freeze you in your tracks and will make your vision quickly flicker across the room, looking for a locker or desk to find shelter under, and the sequences when the beast stumbles upon other human survivors will send you running down the nearest corridor, accompanied by a chorus of shrieks growing increasingly dim, mistaking the sound of your pounding heart for the closing footsteps of your hunter.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion