A review of Alien Isolation
Alien Isolation
Developers: Creative Assembly, Feral Interactive
Publisher: SEGA, Feral Interactive
Released: 2014
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🧠 My quick take:
Starting the game was more fun than finishing the game in my opinion. There are more details on these thoughts below. In all honesty, it was a fun game with tense moments of cat and mouse. If you are looking for a game to keep you thinking about your next choice, this is one of them.
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👁 **First Impressions**
I picked this game up as another horror game notched on my belt. It was requested to be streamed and so I did, very likely due to the fact that I have an appetite for these games.
The first 30 minutes of this game were very slow. There is not a lot of action and more of an ambience build up to set the stage for your experience, from the space station to the isolated feeling of being alone.
Alien Isolation starts with a slow burn and then immediately hooks you when you are confronted with your first face off with the Alien. This changes the tempo of the game entirely.
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🧟 **Atmosphere & Horror Design**
This is a survival, cosmic, sci-fi horror. You are on your own, in space and on a giant station with a lot of adversaries. Essentially, everyone but you.
The fear in this game is based around being isolated. The sounds of the ship, the pacing and dark and light areas. I wouldn’t call this a masterpiece but it does give you a sense of being alone from the start.
A few standout scares would be when you first get nabbed by the Alien because you didn’t notice the drool, Getting ripped out of a locker, or sneak attacked from the back. All of these are negotiable once you figure them out, but that’s the fun right?
Alien Isolation relies on the trope of the Alien lore. If you have ever seen any of the fox Alien movies from the 80s and 90s you already know what you are in for. If not, then good luck! The tropes here are pretty standard, but they didn’t lean too hard into any one particular. For example, the use of jump scares was not overdone, there are a few but not around every corner.
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🕹 **Gameplay Mechanics**
The gameplay mechanics here vary. This is also one of my struggles with this game mechanically speaking. You have the ability to use Combat or Stealth reinforced with resource management.
It was fun, frustrating and immersive all in one. The first 2/3rds or even 3/4ths of the game was absolutely enjoyable. I played this game using combat first and stealth second. You are given your different enemy types that can be negotiated with combat until you encounter the Alien. This forces you to use stealth as the Alien is immune to bullets.
This wasn’t a problem for me mechanically speaking. I won’t lie, I did have a few struggle points, but I found a tempo for me that worked, and I succeeded.
The one thing that didn’t become apparent until the end game was the resource management. This and the change of enemies out of the blue with no explanation. I will do my best to explain without ranting too much!
Resource management is RNG, if you die and respawn the items change for every lootable instance. Which is fine when you first go through an area. This becomes a problem late game as you are now running on empty with a more aggressive threat pushing you with no resupply. This sounds odd when I say this, but when you have the Alien chasing your ass nonstop and you have to backtrack just to restart a generator with no new resources, it gets frustrating. Want to hide? Sure, but it also leads to you dying passively as an interaction can drain your health. Holding your breath for 5 seconds drains your health. This coupled with the AI becoming 10x more aggressive turns into hide for 10 minutes, walk for 2 seconds and then hide again OR hide because your resources aren’t refilled.
There are drops and are RNG, however in my playthrough and me dying several times refreshing the loot showed me a mechanical problem with their RNG algorithm. The items that are most abundant are completely useless against the alien. EMP? Flash? Useless. To be fair, I didn’t try the smoke grenade because it felt useless against the alien. In my defense if you’ve seen the alien movies you know it doesn’t technically “see”.
There are a few items like a noise maker that barely works, but it essentially feels useless. Flares are only a temporary distraction. In the first 3/4ths of the game, its perfectly fine as your paths to choose from are abundant. The items that do work, like the Molotov, pipe bomb, and med kit all share similar resources that in high demand and low drop rate.
My biggest gripe for the mechanics were the end of the game. The androids gain immunity to EMP, 200% HP increase and your only indication this is different is a yellow hazmat suit and to top it off, you kill them using electricity when you hack into a console…. this was a big WTF moment for me. How do they circumnavigate this through weapons? They give you a new weapon that you really only use for a small window of time. Thats it.
All in all, the resource management feels heavily skewed towards items that you wont need the majority of the time. The upgraded enemies don’t make sense. Then when you feel like its over, you are dragged into it again. At least for me it did not give me a hell yeah lets do this. It felt very drug out without a real substantial reason and to add icing to the cake, the ending was SUPER cliche.
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🧬 **Story, Lore & Narrative**
The story starts with A. Ripley as an engineer on the Torrens sent to check out a station that is having trouble. You end up alone, surrounded by enemies and hunted by an apex predator, the Alien. Who knows if you will make it out alive or not?
The story is delivered through cutscenes and logs. They add depth to the details of whats going on in the station and sometimes they give you clues to a nearby safe.
Alien isolation’s theme is sci-fi and horror/action. Its pretty standard for what is expected.
The narrative to me was satisfying for the most part. The ending didn’t feel super impactful but take this as my own perception of it. Like i said earlier, the narrative was good until the end.
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🎨 **Visual & Audio Design**
The art and graphics were well done, I have 0 complaints about the artistry in this game. It was well done and everything aged very well considering I am playing this a decade after it came out.
The sound design was good, but also over done in my opinion. There was a lot of clanking and random metal on metal noise that starts in the beginning and stays until the end. The idea behind the clanking noise was to keep you on your toes of something being nearby, but this is totally killed by the fact that the game will 100% let you know when the alien is nearby. It could of benefitted from less is more in this case.
The audio of the Alien was perfect. It was loud enough as a big guy to hear it walking but also not so loud that you could hear it walking from too far away.
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**Scare Factor Rating**
Overall: 5/10
Jump Scares: 2/5
Psychological Dread: 1/5
Disturbing Imagery: 3/5
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🧠 **Developer Insight**
_What aspiring devs can learn from this game?
Any takeaways from this game is less is more. Coupled with consistency and you find a great recipe for a horror game. Ambience, color swatch, puzzles and adversary. The AI is a great asset to emulate as it learns from the player challenging the player to adapt.
From a design perspective, DONT give new enemies without reason. If your only reason is to add a weapon, then don’t. This game suffers from someone who had the money and wanted it to be X long for playtime versus ending it when it felt right for the story.
Don’t steamroll a player without a justified cause. It breaks immersion and can cause frustration.
Test the item drop algorithms in all stages of the game.
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🧨 **Final Verdict**
I would recommend this game for anyone looking for a horror game that can be challenging but not super jump scary. If you are feint of heart, this game is definitely playable but maybe not on the hardest difficulty.
This game is perfect for anyone looking play cat and mouse with a learning AI.
Score: ⭐️ 3/5
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💬 **Let’s Talk Horror**
I am curious about your experiences playing horror games!
“What’s the scariest game you’ve played?”
“Do you prefer psychological or monster horror?”
“Would you survive this game in real life?”
Let me know what your answers are!
~Devistator5