I just beat this game, after buying it on the launch day, which was after anticipating it for months.
In short: I enjoyed the game a lot and don't regret buying it on the launch day.
The game looks fantastic, and I really, really liked the attention to detail that they put in on just about everything. While I didn't find the game all that scary for long, I felt like they did a good job with setting the game up to be tense. I also like everything about Seegson and how it adds to the Alien universe. For once it's not entirely about Weyland-Yutani.
The game's definitely not perfect though. First comes the non spoilery stuff. I read some people claim that the game was almost too long, and I think they had a point. There were a few times when something came up that felt a bit like padding or were put in for other gratuitous reasons. There
is an awful lot of button mashing and lever pulling, again, often times for reasons that felt like they just wanted you to push a button or pull a lever. Sometimes it adds to the atmosphere to have to pull emergency releases, and that's cool, but sometimes you have to run all over the place to find something to hit just to hit it. The game's difficulty is also really hit or miss, at least on medium difficulty. I'll save details for the spoilers section.
Speaking of which:
I'll start with the difficulty, since I was just talking about it. Up until you deal with the alien for the first time, the game really has no difficulty, except for the first time you run into armed humans who want to kill you. I probably died 15 times trying to get past them (admittedly I was trying not to kill them). Major difficulty spike in trying to understand stealth and such, which is mostly forgivable.
Then came the alien. I probably died 30+ times here before I realized there were two save points I kept missing, which means I was trying to do way too much without getting caught. I was really, really frustrated at first since I was worried the entire game would be like that. When I realized those save points were there (and how to abuse them by dying and reloading so the alien isn't nearby), things got much easier and I never hit any more major snags.
Then you get the flamer and the game becomes almost trivial again. I rarely bothered hiding from the alien at this point. I'd torch it to get it to run away, do what I had to do, then run away before it got back. I never ran out of flamer fuel, and didn't die often. Sometimes I fed hostile humans to the alien by tossing a noise maker their way, but I never actually bothered trying to distract the alien with flares or the noise makers. The effects were too brief to help with using terminals or generators or whatever, and if I just needed to go down another hallway I'd wait for the alien to walk away (or torch it if it walked my way).
The weapons are a bit of a head scratcher too, of course, since you can't kill the alien with weapons that are shown killing them in Aliens, but I understand it's a gameplay thing.
Now, regarding the story... it was pretty hit and miss. I was pretty pleased with it for most of the game, really taking in and enjoying the whole idea of Seegson and what the Sevastopol was. I was eager to find out how the alien got on the station and to see how you'd eventually kill the alien or get it off the station. I knew the game was pretty long, so I was confused when it got ejected in the science lab. I figured it got back on the station somehow, maybe like Ripley. Oh well, I just killed synthetics for a long while, figuring I'd find out soon.
Then stuff started going down hill. I was already figuring out what was going down with APOLLO by the time I spoke with it, and kind of groaned a bit when this game also went down the whole "Weyland-Yutani wants the alien and is willing to spend completely unreasonable amounts of money and throw away as many lives as necessary to get it" plot line again. I was ready to praise the game for not doing that, but...
...I got sidetracked by the alien hive. They never explain how it got on the station. I guess it's possible that the alien that emerged from Foster (I think that's her name) was a queen and not the one you were dealing with early on in the game, but some confirmation of that would have been nice. It really felt a little out of place, but I don't think it's a story breaker. Dealing with facehuggers was a fun little change of pace. Then one got Ricardo.
Speaking of that: I was looking forward to not everybody dying, but of course they did. Even Samuels, which felt kind of weird and forced. I also found it a bit odd that nobody seemed to be surprised that he was a synthetic, although I guess it could have been told to Ripley beforehand and not the player.
The ending also left a lot of questions and some disappointment, unless they're retconning the deleted scene from Aliens where you learn that Amanda died of old age. Not impossible I guess, but I'm figuring we'll find out the real ending in DLC.
Anyway, while that's a huge, long list that makes it sound like I'm ranting, I
did really enjoy the game and would recommend it to any Alien fan. I just kind of wish the story was... better. The gameplay was pretty good, if not really scary. I was more tense leading up to the alien the first time than actually encountering it afterward. Its AI also seemed a bit hit or miss, but was better than I expected nonetheless (I wasn't expecting much).
Maybe I need to play again on hard mode. That might alleviate some of my complaints about it being too easy and not needing distractions.
Author
Topic: Alien Isolation: A creature hunts you! (Read 9388 times)