Alien: Isolation
When I was about 11 years old, I saw my first Alien movie, so I have a very long and traumatic personal history with this series.
I remember it pretty vividly, it was somewhere close to Christmas and my parents had rented Alien 3 from the video store. They were entertaining friends that evening and I, being bored decided to watch the movie all alone in our upstairs bedroom. Everything was going great until about twenty minutes in, where it suddenly took a very dark turn. There was a scary alien creature, a cross between the hand from the Addams Family and a spider. This thing attached itself to a very cute dog and then proceeded to implant something inside the dog, a little while later what ever had growing inside that poor animal burst out killing it. This is when my seemingly wonderful evening and all those happy nights of peacefully sleeping ended.
The creature had become the scariest thing in my world as a little boy, I recalled waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, scared to death that it was coming to get me. This eventually turned me into a huge fan of the series when I got older, and each time I watched it was a way to relive that fear and emotion you felt as a child. Obviously as an adult you would never be as scared as that kid was, watching Alien all alone.
The year is 2137, fifteen years after the disappearance of the Nostromo spacecraft, Amanda Ripley is approached by the Weyland corporation to investigate the the discovery of the Nostromo's flight recorder.
Amanda who is the daughter of Ellen Ripley, the protagonist of the Alien series, sets out to a remote space station deep in unknown space. The group arrives at the space station to find it heavily damaged and its communications offline. The only option now is to board this massive station in hopes of finding out what has happened here.
Once on board the almost deserted space station, things go from bad to worse, Ripley eventually finds the flight recorder with no data and also learns that a deadly alien creature has made it's way on board. This seems to be the reason that everything has gone haywire and why there is almost not a soul in sight. Ripley now has to explore this huge creepy space station to get to the bottom of what is going on, as well as find out what has happened to her mother.
Right from the moment you pop the game in and hit start, you get greeted with that very nostalgic broken-tracking-on-the-VCR visual effects in the opening.
I was literally transported back in time to my 11 year old self, lying on the bed with a pillow over my head, scared for my life. This was to date the best Alien game I have played, and one of the highlights that really stood out in this game was the overall sound score and sound design. You need to play this in a dark room, alone and with the music all the way up, the clue is in the name. The sound truly makes this game haunting, from your echoed steps in the long metal passages to the way Ripley starts to breathe when she gets scared. The hand held motion scanner really does not help to make things things more comfortable, it actually does just the opposite. When any movement is detected the scanner starting pinging more frequently the closer that something gets to you, and it gets pretty stressful.
I really loved that they took their sweet time to introduce the Alien, for the most part the developers kept toying with my emotions, with scenes where you are deadly sure it's going to happen, but then just nothing. Once the Alien Xenomorph does start stalking you through the creepy dark space station the game take on a complete different style. This is where you become the hunted and every second of this is absolutely stressful. You are going to die, and you are going to die a lot, just make peace with that.
"Final report of the vessel Prometheus. The ship and her entire crew are gone. If you're receiving this transmission, make no attempt to come to its point of origin. There is only death here now, and I'm leaving it behind. It is New Year's Day, the year of our Lord, 2094. My name is Elisabeth Shaw, last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching." - Elizabeth Shaw
Alien Isolation is, in my opinion, the best Alien game to date. This is exactly how an action horror game should be, and it perfectly captures all that is everything we have come to love about Alien.
There were a few things that eventually got under my skin, this was one of the first games where I was wishing for it to end. My reason for this is, once you get more than halfway through the game, it ends up becoming rinse and repeat with the Xenomorph encounters. The frequency of being hunted by this unstoppable enemy starts to dilute the scariness of the experience around the end of the game.
The game has a survival mode game that places you in different scenarios where you need to get the high score, but after the endurance session of trying to kill this monster at the end of the game, I didn't even bother to try this. One really great feature was that you could plug in your PlayStation camera, and using the built in microphone, the game would then pick up on the noise levels in the area you are playing. Any loud sounds would attract the alien to your position, this as you can imagine did not last long. Any time @princessmewmew would come talk to me, or my phone getting notifications, I would be killed by the Alien, so this was more of just a gimmick.
Alien Isolation is a survival horror game developed by the company Creative Assembly, who have been more of a strategy style game developer, and has made games like the Total War series and one or two sports games.
I'm personally not very familiar with any of their titles, they did however do a fantastic job on this game, and completely encompassed everything that Alien was all about. The game was published by Sega, who need no introduction and the title is available on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and as well as Windows. Alien is not the newest of games, it was released in November 2014, and I was lucky enough to pick it up for next to nothing on the PlayStation store.
I give Alien Isolation 2 a fearful 7/10.
In case you missed it, here is the previous game review
Thanks for popping in, hope you liked the post. Please leave me your thoughts and or opinions in the comments below, have a beautiful day.
Game review for ADSactly by MorkRock
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