Alien: Isolation Review

Alien: Isolation contributes more evidence to the case that creating video games based on the iconic Alien franchise is difficult. Rebellion took on a tri-species experience with Aliens vs Predator in 2010, but the generic campaign was underwhelming. Gearbox tried to focus on Colonial Marines last year, but created one of the poorest shooters in the last decade. Alien: Isolation’s shift towards survival-horror removes any trace of pulse rifles or smartguns. Aiming for a stealthy experience, it is more about dying than killing. On paper this sounds like the best chance for the franchise, but implementation is everything.

In Alien: Isolation you take the role of Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley, set after the events of the first movie. She receives word from the ‘company’ that they located the flight recorder from the Nostromo and it is aboard Sevastopol station. Amanda joins a small crew and attempts to board the station after ignoring a radio message that sounds like a warning. After barely making it aboard, she conveniently loses contact with her crew and fellow boarders. Amanda soon discovers the station is in chaos and a Xenomorph is onboard killing people. Alone and ill-equipped, Amanda must summon courage to find the flight recorder and get out alive.

The Sevastopol Station is rich with atmosphere and based heavily on the design of the first Alien movie. The crippled station will lurch and rumble, suffering through collisions and system malfunctions. Aesthetics from the movie are preserved with a retro sci-fi design and padded walls. You may walk down a corridor, enveloped by flashing lights and klaxon alarms, only to react at the faintest sound or shadow. Or you may admire the reflections on the floor before receiving a telltale blip from your motion tracker. The atmosphere is perfect for the Alien threat and the retro design is a refreshing change from the sterile modern approach to sci-fi.

The layout of the station is not open, but there are transit hubs framing the objectives. While moving through the station you will spot doors requiring tools you have yet to acquire, an ominous sign there will be back-tracking. Major objectives consist of establishing communications, finding a trauma kit or aligning a satellite dish. Minor objectives involve finding a key card or restoring power to an area. Often the context provided for these objectives minimal, you will get most of the information from the helpful 2D map telling you exactly where to go. The amount of important story-related dialogue could probably be compressed onto a single page and the voice actor for Amanda is flat. The presentation qualities of the story are nowhere near as slick or precise as games like Dead Space.

Unlike Dead Space, stealth is the primary component helping you avoid the many deaths you incur throughout the station. There are minimal cues from enemies about your impending detection, so you must learn the tolerances on your own. You are harder to see and hear while crouched, so crawling around is practically required when hostiles are nearby. This is one reason why it takes a long time to progress through areas: you crawl for twenty minutes, only to die seconds after making a minor mistake. The save system is punishing, but it can be rewarding to hear the beep from the save station after dying several times in the same area.

There are three types of foes determined to kill you, and their routines can be terrifying or game-breaking. The first of these are the Working Joe Androids, who are surprisingly effective in both role and game lore. They only walk towards you, but their persistence should be respected. If they get close, you will need to struggle free from their clutches. Setting them on fire is not enough, as they tell you about their fire resistance. It is disappointing that stronger Androids appear later to counter your improved arsenal. Still, the Androids function as intended and become a reasonable threat with vulnerabilities.

The Human scavengers are undeniably brainless and the worst of the three enemy types. Humans initially open fire on sight, yet in other areas they warn you before wasting their infinite supply of bullets. You can use this to your advantage, tempting them to fire in order to lure the Alien out of hiding so you have fewer enemies to face. The animations for humans are not great, as they turn on the spot and may fire before their weapon is aiming in the correct direction. They aim for headshots even when your head is obscured and one enemy spent two minutes trying to headshot me through a vent when the rest of my body was visible.

Human foes can stand next to their dead companions for minutes with their aim frozen in place. They aren’t frozen in fear; their AI scripts have just hit one of those endless loops. Even the non-hostile humans, however few there are, scurry back and forth behind advertising signs while Amanda Ripley nonchalantly tries to block their navigation paths. Another problem with the Humans is you are never sure if they are friend or foe. In one area you sneak up behind some characters that turn out to be friendlies. When returning to this same area twenty minutes later, hostile humans shoot you before dying at the claws of a scripted Alien. The presence of human combatants almost single-handedly ruins the believable atmosphere despite their relative infrequency.

Alien AI is crucial to the entire experience, as it is the super predator on the station and the only foe you cannot defeat with weapons. The best qualities of the Alien are its erratic behaviour, speed and persistence. The creature will patrol areas in no obvious pattern before heading into the ducts. It will hear sounds and spot flares, heading to investigate, giving you the opportunity to move to another room. The game is most entertaining when you are tracking the Alien through multiple walls as you circle your objective.

Unfortunately, the Alien follows you a little too well you when moving to adjacent areas. If you need to find a key card in a set of rooms, the Alien circles through those rooms to make your task arduous. It follows in the ducts above even if you maintain flawless stealth. It’s best to think of the Alien as a parent who is trying to find their child in a game of hide and seek. The parent knows where the child is, but they will circle the area pretending they are still searching. Amanda Ripley is that child, and she gets killed when the Alien decides it is time for bed.

You will die frequently because the Alien changes routines. In one escape sequence, the Alien would position itself in subsequent vents all the way to the destination, as though it knew where Ripley was heading. On the fifth attempt, the Alien dropped from the third vent and spotted Ripley before she had any chance to react. Alien: Isolation employs trial and error aspects, because it keeps players honest. But when you die enough times in one area, death becomes trivial.

The Alien often comes out from hiding so you can admire the perfect organism. Various scripted scenes play out identically on replay, such as bursting into a room in an act of aggression, even when Amanda is hiding behind an air-hockey table. At various points throughout the game, the Alien leaves the ducts and traipses down open corridors as though it was on a brisk morning walk. The loud footsteps, a helpful aid to reduce the reliance on the motion detector, indicate the creature is unconcerned about stealth. This shatters the concept of an Alien desiring to be seen only when it wants to be seen.

To facilitate your survival against each of the three enemy types, you can craft an array of items from blueprints scattered around the station. Throwable items include noisemakers, EMP grenades and smoke grenades. The EMP grenade will disable Androids for a short time so you can give them a one-two punch with your melee attack. When Ripley throws these items, they rocket forward with such force that they can land just about anywhere. Precise placement is near impossible and even when the noisemaker lands approximately where you wanted, the Alien might ignore it.

Few of the crafting items seem necessary. Why do we need to jerry-rig a complex noisemaker device when throwing a flare produces similar results? Why couldn’t we throw one of the many bottles of Rye scattered around the station to produce an audible distraction? Why does there need to be so many crafting components when a funds-based system would suffice? If the rewire mechanic was more comprehensive, allowing you to change more conditions across the station, it might render most items redundant. Much of the crafting is unnecessary clutter when all you need to make are med-kits. And they could have easily been placed in the world individually.

For better or worse, Alien: Isolation is not a game without standard weapons. The first weapon you acquire is a six-shot revolver, but it attracts the Alien so it quickly gets demoted. The Stun Baton allows Ripley to get close to humanoids and put them down with minimal noise, but the lack of charges is frustrating. You’ll even get a shotgun and boltgun, used mostly against tougher Androids during the later sections. All of these weapons feel decidedly pedestrian and do not enhance the atmosphere. In fact, their existence feels out of place after you unload four shotgun shells into the Alien, who shrugs them off and kills you anyway.

The flame-thrower is a real game-changer, facilitating some of the best mechanics in the entire game. The core stealth design is refreshed due to a temporary shift in power. You’ll use the flames to fend off the creature while you perform routine tasks. Or maybe just blast the unsuspecting Alien with flames because it terrorized you for so long. After some time the Alien seems to learn, keeping its distance when it sees the flame or holding ground after you release a few short bursts. If you holster the flame-thrower and the creature reappears, you have my sympathies.

Watching the fuel on the flame-thrower gradually diminish creates palpable tension. Do you waste more fuel on another burst, to complete the objective quickly, or sneak through an area and preserve it? Moving through an area with 4 units of fuel remaining was analogous to the turret scene in Aliens, just enough flames to keep the Alien from pouncing.

All of the components are letdown by disagreeable pacing across the game’s two halves. In the first half of the game, the experience crawls along as you deal with the ever-present Alien threat. You will look back and realise how little you have accomplished and how long the game forces you to remain low-profile. Areas that would take you minutes to walk across take an hour because the Alien is on your back. The game pushes you into dawdling stealth for long periods without reprieve.

The second half of the game drags like razor-sharp claws on a chalkboard for a different reason. The Alien becomes scarce and you back-track through areas just to pull levers or shoot Androids. There are two monotonous spacewalks, which offer no urgency despite their imposing visuals, and a bizarre platforming sequence. This creates hours of unexciting gameplay that might send you into hypersleep. These docile sections would have been an ideal break from the smothering Alien during the earlier segments, but instead produce stagnation near the conclusion.

The campaign flow also suffers because the best finale actually occurs at the midpoint. What you think might be thirty more minutes of narrative cleanup is actually eight hours of finales. After each subsequent ending, the game will whisk you to the opposite side of the station and prepare for another contextually ineffective ending. All elements should have been compressed and reshuffled to create a genuine rollercoaster ride of fear and relief. Instead, it puts you in a haunted house for eight hours and throws you on a carousel for the final eight.

Alien: Isolation has all the pieces needed to make an excellent Alien experience. Unfortunately, some pieces are twice their correct size, upside-down or from a different puzzle. This leads to a disfigured final picture that does no justice to the fantastic setting. The Sevastopol station has real character and the design melds perfectly with the original movie. If the game matched the atmosphere, there would be no doubting its success. Instead, the game struggles to deliver an even, flowing experience. The atrocious human intelligence obliterates the believability of the world. The Alien reappears so often it is impossible to ignore the flaws. Even the weapons and crafting system adds clutter that takes away more than it adds. Alien: Isolation has good concepts, but most are eviscerated on execution.