Thrown into a living nightmare, at war against an unbeatable enemy, factions spread across a sprawling and drifting space-station broken and with no end in sight, Alien Isolation plunges you into the darkest of your fears as you creep, crawl and run through the Sevastopol station to escape from this disaster. Welcome Ripley…..
Amanda Ripley that is, on her own personal mission to find out what happened to her mother when she disappeared years ago. As you venture towards the Sevastopol you are alone, not by your own making, finding friend and foe a plenty along the way. Alien Isolation feels like an Alien film which is a fantastic complement in itself, with its sprawling landscape in the shadows of the deserted trading station.
The Xenomorph itself is an unstoppable machine, it terrorises you with its threat of attack at any given moment, and the game has been well designed so that it can prey on you with impressive ease without making it blindingly obvious at the same time. Each cut scene and moment in the story is well timed and rehearsed so that you get the full effect of your heart pounding through your chest, it’s a shame it doesn’t maintain this throughout as the game goes on you sort of realise a distinctive pattern and are left expecting rather than being surprised.
Ripley shows all of the emotion of her mother from the films and the other characters you come across present an interesting front as you decipher whether they are friend or foe. This makes moving around the trade station a lot more interesting, not only do you have to be aware of the universes deadliest creature but you have to be aware of whom you might run into.
Alien Isolation allows you to use the Alien to your advantage, there are times in the game were it will be simply impossible to take down a team so making noise to attract the alien is your only bet, and boy is it effective. The Alien swoops with terror and no mercy killing all its wake, its almost beautiful, almost. The Alien itself is massive compared to what it looks like in the films and its terror reigns supreme.
You’re told early on you need to craft to survive, Isolation leaves nice little treat boxes full of goodies working towards the main goal of forming something to keep you alive, the blueprints are scattered with more complex toys such as noise makers being available later on in the story. This is where we come to the most nifty bits of kit, the tracker and the hacker. The tracker is your best friend, until you get the flame thrower, it sniffs out anyone who walks by and isn’t restricted to the Alien, which comes in real handy. It’s accurate to the point where the game still poses a challenge. The hacker presents small puzzles so it’s not as easy as just tapping A to get through a door anymore, when the Alien is on your back and you have to do this quickly and accurately, things get intense.
I always like to do a section on value for money and Alien Isolation is no exception with 18 missions in the main story, and around 20+ hours of play time just going through the missions there’s a fair bit of value here. The Sevastopol is so large that exploration is a must with hidden areas and collectables to be had! The Survival mode has you completing objectives in the fastest time possible yielding a higher score, it is okay but I wouldn’t spend too much time in this area of the game. With 5 sets of DLC on the way you can certain extend your playing time.
Graphically the only fault I had with the game were the Andriods who looked remarkably mediocre compared to the high standard the game sets. A bit of a let-down but the game picks up in most of the other areas and looks good. Sound is terrific as you’d expect as it plays such a major part which is where the Kinect features come in. It’s a shame we’ve seen fewer and fewer games not make use of the Kinect but Alien Isolation, although not abundantly, does make use of the voice recognition features, which if you live in a noisy house you’ll be dead in a second.
Sadly Alien Isolation does have performance issues, it gitters and slides all over the place at times and is a real problem in the early stages of the game, strange as the game doesn’t suffer these problems in the later moments of the game.
Overall Alien Isolation pitches some interesting and positive concepts that need some work, its predecessors haven’t set the bar high at all for this franchise so Alien Isolation looks great compared to them, for the full price you pay close to the release date I’d say may be wait, it’s a good game but not worth the full 54.99 they want on Xbox, An enjoyable scary experience but let down with some niggling but ever present issues. I can understand now why there was such a mxed reaction.
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