Alien Isolation Review

Alien Isolation Review | October 17, 2014
Xbox, Windows, PlayStation

Alien Isolation is a 1st person survival horror stealth video game that is set 15 years after the first Alien movie and 42 years before the second movie. You get to play as Ripley but not the Sigourney Weaver Ellen Ripley character but her daughter Engineer Amanda Ripley. The company has asked Engineer Ripley to retrieve the flight recorder from the spaceship Nostromo her mother’s ship. Looking for answers about what happen to the crew and what has happen to her mom she agrees and sets of to the space station Sevastopol. Once on the station she recognizes that everything is wrong. There is almost no power, there does not seem to be any people around and no one is responding.

At the start of the game we spent the first hour or so restoring power and unlocking door to get into the closed off areas. We like it because if felt like it was building up the anxiety level for a big payoff coming up. Then we realized that the entire game is like this and we got bored and then we found ourselves sad and disappointed just a couple hours into playing. You really almost spend the whole game just sneaking around and hiding from the Alien. The idea is what the first movie is about but it makes a terrible video game idea. Who want to play a game where you spend roughly 85% just running and hiding and not fighting off the alien creature and if it catches you, you die. There is almost no combat and when you are fighting, it is mostly against androids and other people on the station. The androids are killing everybody and the survivors have decided to split off in smaller factions and kill other survivors instead of helping each other, it makes no sense. Also, fighting alerts the Alien to your location. This means it is back to sneaking and hiding and being bored all over again.

The controls are also a mess. You always have to be in the perfect spot to open doors, vents and grab items, plus aiming in combat feels off. Reloading guns take forever, and the melee is hard to aim. It seemed like our hits were not working sometimes. If you shoot or hit an enemy and hit it a second time while it is still reacting from the first hit, the second one did not seem to register. We started hitting them once and then backing up, waiting for android to come at us and then hit it again. It just did not work right for us. The menu screens are awkward and doing simple things took too long and requires too many steps. And our final complaints simple things like a door will take forever to open even though it open very quickly 30 second earlier. You don’t even get a good weapon until half way through and the load screens take forever slowing down the game. That is how the whole game is, nonstop boredom.

Almost nothing about Alien Isolation works and many parts of the game don’t make sense. Quietly taking out a person will alert the Alien where you are but using a cutting torch or staring a generator does not? Why are the people on the space station killing each other? You can’t fight the Alien or fight the people or androids without attracting the Alien so where is the incentive to explore other parts of the game to do the extra things? You spend hours in silence just doing the same thing, restore power, unlock a door, run from the Alien, look at a computer file, you just get stuck in this loop of doing nothing. Why would gamers want to play a game where you almost never fight the Alien? The only good things about the game is there are some fun puzzles to unlocking doors and the voice talent and visuals are good. It us 15 hours to get through the game and there is no replay value. Keep you price under $15.

6.0 out of 10
Clearance Bin

6.0 out of 10
Clearance Bin

Rated
M for Mature

Rated
PEGI 18