Game Details Developer: Creative Assembly

Publisher: Sega

Platform: PC (reviewed), PS4, Xbox One

Release Date: October 7, 2014

Price: $60 (PC: $50)

Links: Steam | Official website Creative Assembly: Sega: PC (reviewed), PS4, Xbox OneOctober 7, 2014: $60 (PC: $50)

There was no way that the Xeno could have seen where I hid. I’d been looking for medical supplies in this space station’s sickbay, and after receiving directions from a fellow straggler, I found a computer terminal, bathed in sickly green light, with the information I needed. Unfortunately, booting the machine set off an alarm. Damn.

I already knew the alien bastard was coming before the motion tracker in my hands began to vibrate wildly, and sure enough, the Xeno soon descended from a hole in the roof. I ran behind a corner and poked my head out to watch its bendy limbs flex and its massive mouth water through a plume of fog. I knew my revolver would never fell this thing, so I waited for an opening and made a dash for a mechanical door. Once through, I slammed it shut with a manual override button, then I crawled into a locker down the hallway and hid.

Within ten seconds, the alien magically crawled through all of the right vents or holes or whatever and found my hiding spot and killed me. The sequence left me screaming—not in terror, but in frustration. HOW THE HELL DID IT FIND ME?

I understand that the Alien series’ most famous villain was built to hunt efficiently, but this was the thirtieth time in a matter of hours that this particular Xeno had overcome every imaginable hiding strategy I had tried and found me. Whether I was ducking behind cover, crawling through vents, or creating impenetrable seals to block its path, the Xeno had absolutely no trouble ferreting out my position and killing me with haste.

This will be the lasting legacy of Alien: Isolation for me, instead of the game's impeccable ‘80s sci-fi interiors, its tense soundscapes, or even its ham-fisted plot. Developer Creative Assembly put together the skeleton of a truly terrifying game, one that could have lived up to the first Alien film’s sci-fi-horror legacy—and one that could have erased the awful taste left in our mouths by Aliens: Colonial Marines. Instead, the interesting design decision to limit the quantity of super-powered Xenos in the game certainly wasn’t accompanied by a boost in quality.

Canon fodder?

Alien: Isolation sends players to the Sevastopol, a space outpost operated by the notorious Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It had once housed a significant population of workers and scientists, but you arrive there only to find looters, angry graffiti marks, and bizarrely disemboweled bodies.

























Did I mention that you play as Amy Ripley? That’s right, as in the daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Your mother has been missing for years since the events of Alien, and you’ve gotten a tip that black box recordings from your mom’s lost ship have somehow found their way on board the Sevastopol. So it's off to space you go.

You’ll find mostly tangential connections to official Alien canon while wandering through this mysterious spaceship, which happens to be littered with a Bioshock-ian plethora of journal entries and voice recordings that explain the many ways life aboard the Sevastopol went into the crapper. The stories found on old computer terminals are pretty decently written, but you won’t often feel comfortable flipping through them mid-game.

That’s because Amy Ripley is far from a colonial marine. She’s a Weyland-Yutani engineer, meaning she’s more comfortable welding and assembling gizmos than aiming a machine gun. So Amy keeps her pockets full of flashbangs, noisemakers, flares, and other room-control machinery, and not direct weaponry. The game does hand her a revolver, but it’s mostly for show; the thing can put down a Working Joe cyborg after five bullets, but by then, its friends will have surrounded you and taken you out.

The game’s object, then, is to run around a space station in search of keycards, access codes, and other “press A to use” objectives, all the while hiding whenever anything beeps on your handy motion tracker. You won’t find any puzzles, unless you count occasional moments in which the game assumes you know that you can, say, budge an otherwise innocuous-looking ceiling vent open or force an automatic door to stay locked for a few seconds.

Alien: Isolation doesn’t care much for teaching players anything, which would be fine if the game immersed the player in constant learn-by-doing moments and interesting interactive systems. Instead, it makes 99 percent of its decorations and objects untouchable, meaning that the rare moments when a background object is suddenly usable are always jarring—especially since your progress is usually blocked until you figure out which random doodad to interact with.

Dishonorable discharge

At this point in the history of game design, I’d settle for every vaguely stealth-ish game blatantly copying Dishonored’s stealth systems without even attempting to make something better on their own (a lofty task, for sure). That 2012 game, which Ars rightfully declared best of its year, did a wonderful job telegraphing how your motions and actions raised foes’ suspicions, along with allowing the player to undo many unintentional screw-ups should they want to hide again.

Compare that system to the garbage stealth Alien: Isolation has cooked up over two years later. Enemies either magically guess where you've wound up on the map or stare directly at you and pretend you don’t exist. Your higher-speed sprints and device toggles come with no feedback declaring whether or not they raise any further suspicion.

Additionally, while the gadgets come with a variety of descriptions, they’re all essentially the same for gameplay purposes: throw them one way, run the other, and enjoy however long the enemies glitch out examining your gizmos so you can get some stuff done without a Xeno breathing down your neck.

The tendons of plot development and dialogue that connect the game’s tensest stuff are sinewy and brittle. You meet a few companions along the way, all cursed with hokey dialogue and voice acting. This is made all the more painful during the first one or two hours of the game, which don't even feature a single hide-and-survive to break up these painful bits of story.

It’s easy to dismiss the worst stuff as intentionally hokey in the finest B-movie style. After all, everybody you meet is disposable, thanks to the various evils lurking around the abandoned Sevastopol. As such, it might seem silly to expect legitimate character development between disembowelings. However, this doesn’t work in a game where players have so few effective maneuvers and utterly useless weapons. Since you can’t enjoyably blast your way through a world where plot is unimportant, you're left waiting in hidey holes and staring at environs you quickly stop caring about.

Cold to the touch

Which is a shame, because those environs look stunning. The combined teams at Creative Assembly and 20th Century Fox should be applauded for marrying the power of next-gen consoles (and, in our case, the jaw-dropping Windows build on a souped-up PC) with the cold, harsh aesthetics of Alien.

Alien: Isolation is a wonderland of steel-lined computer mainframes, blood splatters, particle effects, bursts of flame, plasticky cyborgs, glowing terminals, and so much more. It’s all rendered in a way that feels like you’re playing inside a tangible, life-size Alien toy set. We played a bit of the Xbox One build and appreciated its details and stable frame rate, but the PC version on a high-end machine takes the visual cake. Our GeForce GTX 670 rig ran the game on ultra settings with nary a hitch or frame rate stutter.

The only real pockmark on the game’s looks is how it handles living creatures, from lousy facial animations to occasional Xeno glitches. There's nothing as wonky as what we saw in Aliens: Colonial Marines, but sometimes a Xeno's giant, drooping tail looks like a coat hanger being waved around. At least the sound design picks up the slack thanks to a mix of Xeno screeches, metal scrapes, computer beeps, and symphonic swells, which all serve to alert players that bad things may soon be afoot.

Sadly, the aesthetic achievements fail to redeem Alien: Isolation's fatal flaw: its brutal difficulty. If you’re found, you’re dead. It's as simple as that. And the game doesn’t come with any indicators of how to sneak more effectively, nor any smart level design that encourages searching for multiple paths. In nearly every bad situation, you have only one way to go, and once you figure out your path, it becomes a matter of throwing distracting gizmos and walking to your destination in the hopes that your foes have glitched into a dumb moment to allow you to pass.

The alternate, logical tack of hiding, waiting for foes to pass, setting traps, and walking along rarely pays off, because Alien Isolation’s AI offers no predictable patterns or reasonable logic. One minute, a Xeno stares right into your eyes and walks past. The next, it drops directly onto your head after your radar insists that the nearest motion is at least two rooms away. The game tries to evoke old-school challenge with elements like manual save points and dinky puzzles, but those things are mere annoyances compared to the frustration of the game's linear environments and punishingly random AI.

After wasting many long hours with try-and-try-again sequences, I'll admit I didn't actually get to the end of Alien: Isolation before writing this review. Even after dropping the difficulty to "easy," I just couldn't do it. I wanted to give the game back to the developers at Creative Assembly like a term paper, marked up with red underlines and an all-caps note that read, “TRY AGAIN.” Even in a release-now, patch-later gaming world, I worry that Alien Isolation’s woes—its broken AI, its boring levels, and its utter lack of a reasonable alert system—are too entrenched in the game’s body, eager to burst out of its stomach and unhappily surprise Alien fans.

The Good:

Terrifying sound design that should doubly scare anybody with a robust surround sound system

The most stunning art direction and 3D rendering ever seen in an Alien game

Pretty solid bits of writing found hidden in the game's terminals

The Bad:

Artificial intelligence has little rhyme or reason, with foes either playing stupid or magically discovering your location

Levels almost always offer only one path, breaking any hopes that a patched AI system will ever lead to a more interesting hide-and-survive experience

Alien franchise fans hoping for a serious series payoff won't find much interesting content that connects to the films

The Ugly:

In multiple instances, we spent over an hour and a half trying to sneak around a single checkpoint's worth of game distance. This game is tuned for utter frustration.

Verdict: Find a Let's Play of the PC build, crank up the resolution, and watch someone else have a terrible time in this beautiful game.