Way back when, I impulsively picked this up at a Best Buy, not knowing anything about the game, but recognizing that Yoji Shinkawa art on the cover. And lets just say, Metal Gear Solid this was not. I think it’s really sleazy how hard they tried to dupe suckers like me into thinking it was with all that similar imagery. Even more so when I learned after the fact that it actually belongs to the Front Mission franchise, which was dormant for a while prior to this game. I have no connection to that universe but I can’t imagine those who do being too happy with this after waiting ages for a new entry in the series.

The game itself, I really don’t know what it’s trying to do, but it’s not good at any of it. It seems like it’s framed as a stealth game, but it hasn’t even the most basic of stealth mechanics, not even a takedown (well, it does, but not in a stealth context). It doesn’t really work as an action game, the shooting is some of the most janky and unpolished in any game, and you’re severely punished for engaging enemies, they’re stupidly spongey and hose you down in seconds with laser precision. It’s clear to me that combat is meant to be something to avoid, and yet you aren’t really given the tools to avoid it. Hell, it tells you to run away at points but then it boxes you in and makes fighting your only real option, and through most of it, you’re fighting the game’s mechanics more so than the enemies themselves. I dropped out I think around the halfway point. I made it as far as I did by either A) spamming RC explosives to clear enemies out from afar, the AI is stupid as hell and just kind of congregates around where the explosion happened, letting you keep lobbing them at the same area until they’re all dead. B) Cheesing them with this trick I found where sliding into them knocks them over, letting you instakill them on the ground with the pipe, an unreliable strategy because the hitboxes are weirdly strict and the slide will sometimes just go off in whatever direction it feels like leaving you to be gunned down. And C) just bull rushing past everyone to the exit on the dubious hope that I don’t get gunned down, essentially this: https://youtu.be/XWsTpvJIM5g?si=vxMBzKfnZsn8IpnT

Add to that a pretty generic story, voice acting that ranges from embarrassing at worst to okay at best, levels that look like they were put together in Gmod, these really sloppy mech sections, the Koshka voice which never shuts up and triggers my Metal Gear Survive PTSD, and yeah, no. I don’t think this game is very good.

This game fucking suuuuuuuuuuuucks so bad. I do mean like really bad. It has the worst AI I've seen in a game published by a major studio, it has a massive amount of bugs -- but I love it so much. It's a beautiful trainwreck of good ideas and bad gameplay.

I have warm feelings about this game despite me hating nearly every second of playing it. It is one of those it's so bad it's good pieces of media, so if that's your bag, pick this one up for 49 cents or whatever it goes for on sale. A guy gave me his PS4 copy for free because he was so pissed off about it and it had a low resale value lmao.

I must preface my thoughts on this game with the fact that I got it for £3 and I have very minimal experience with both Front Mission, which I've played three maps of and enjoyed but haven't had the time to return to, and Armored Core, which I have spent hours on the web page for a used game shop's listing of Armored Core 4 and never actually buying it.

In a certain way this is a predecessor to Balan Wonderworld, another of Square Enix's attempts to use the cache of established creator(s) to sell a game they gave ten bucks and some duct tape to make. Unlike Balan Wonderworld though, there is a certain genius to Left Alive and I cannot bring myself to actually dislike it.

This is a game about running. Running from the past, running in the present, running to the future. It's not a stealth or survival game, ultimately, it's a game about running as bullets rain down on you to the next save point or mission marker. And when it works, it works extremely well. There is an unhinged chaos to the game that absolutely reflects the state of Novo Slava as pure hopelessness accentuates every pacing step Mikhail, Olga and Leo takes. When this unhinged chaos doesn't work, however, the bones of its unpolished systems get stuck in your throat and suffocates any love you would end up growing towards it.

The narrative is sometimes badly and even brokenly told but there is a genuine humanity to some of its characters, even minor characters like Sofia. Ivan, who speaks entirely in baseball metaphors, has a daring last stand against Mikhail, the two of them piloting the Wanzers that are the crux of the narrative, in one of the most exhilarating boss battles I've seen in a game this conventionally "bad". I've heard very good things about the writing in Front Mission, especially Front Mission 2, and I could glimpse that potential in this game's setting and worldbuilding.

Again, I simply cannot bring myself to dislike this game. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who cannot stomach games that aren't polished, or for those offended by Front Mission's corpse being reanimated like this, but for anyone who desires a game that's as chaotically designed as its besieged city in winter setting, Left Alive is an interesting /thing/.

“This isn’t a stealth game or a shooter, it’s a third person ‘Coward ‘em Up."

- ThorHighHeels, LEFT ALIVE: A Future Cult Classic?

I kind of loved it, but I fully acknowledge that the game is a mess. It honestly feels like playing the beta version of what would, with a year’s worth of additional development time, be a GOAT-contender. Aside from not being able to stealth kill enemies, there’s no enemy chatter or soundscape to speak of, no stamina meter to stop you from dodge-rolling everywhere, and it’s a game where your molotov is more effective at disorienting enemies than flashbangs or smoke grenades. Again: a mess.

The game reaches near “Dead Space” levels of tutorialization, stressing that you shouldn’t be fighting enemies with UI prompts, mission objectives, your very own AI telling you to avoid combat- and yet I still had trouble not trying to clear out every intersection and checkpoint. Ultimately, it’s a game where a single empty can used to create a distraction will be more valuable to you than all the weapons and ammo you can get your hands on, creating enough of a window to bolt to the nearest alleyway or grab a few items.

I also get the sense that even if this was the most immaculately presented, technically proficient experience on the market, that people would still hate it, as the real challenge of the game came less from completing the main missions than from escorting survivors. Oftentimes they’ll need to be convinced, which can mean grabbing an item from an extra-dangerous area or talking them into it (you can pretty easily fail these.) And when you finally get them to move, they have a set path to a shelter, as though they’re on rails, meaning you’ll be forced to find ways to clear a route for them, the GPS seemingly always opting to move them through the most heavily-fortified areas.

Doing a few of these got me to see more of the games systems; a morbidly helpful heatmap that shows you where other players have died (note to self: avoid that one intersection), and an alert network that will call for reinforcements if you get into a protracted gunfight- but will also mean adjacent areas will be less patrolled. This means there’s a benefit to playing like a guerilla fighter, where getting into pointless battles can create an opening for whoever you’re escorting through, plating tripwires and tossing explosives so that more and more troops come pouring in. It’s a peculiar rhythm, with an almost survival-horror feeling of having overcome, but not really beaten each encounter.

I want to give special mention to the standard enemies, soldiers with exosuits that can jump over obstacles, and drones that can alternate between aerial patrol and ground combat form. In short, when they aren’t getting stuck on fences, they feel like they have answers to your abilities (I was floored the first time I tried to lure a guard into a trap only to see him mantle a car and move behind me, more games should rip this off.)

There’s a section halfway through the game that feels like a glimpse of a masterpiece, where you need to hold out in the main lobby of city hall, the obvious strategy being to plant traps around the two stairwells and the entrance doors, locking down the main routes to the second floor. Dumb as the enemies usually are, they’re actually pretty good about identifying traps, meaning the first wave was able to walk in, avoid or disarm most of the explosives, and use their enhanced mobility to scale the crates scattered around the lobby to get to the second floor, circumventing the stairway entirely.

Disappointingly though, this chapter also signals the shift towards mediocrity, stealth encounters giving way to combat tunnels where enemies gamely stand next to explosive barrels and chest-high concrete barriers litter the battlefield. It picks back due to the sheer absurdity of the action in the final missions, but I don’t think it ever recaptures the tension of the earlier sections.

Oh, and there are mechs!

First time one is dropped off in front of you is incredible, but on-foot they basically function as Very Big Guards, and when you finally commandeer one, the mech combat itself is a slog. As with the rest of the game, there’s a surprising amount to it- different weapons, positional damage, a cover system, combos(!), but it’s a chore to play through these sections.

(Was thrilled when I found out I could just ditch my mech and run for the exit during an especially tough fight later on in the game. Felt like my training from earlier on had paid off.)

Know my tendency when I write is to focus on mechanics and the nebulous “feel” of a game, but that’s not to say the story is without merit; there’s the baseline, campy appeal of having a villain who starts monologuing about baseball as soon as he appears, or the resistance leader who dies and reappears over and over, able involve himself in every major scene despite having killed him minutes before, but there’s some more substantial stuff here too, like how the game tries to explore a resistance movement from multiple angles, from its appropriation by the State, down to ramifications of the death one of its eager new members (another reason you should talk to the survivors!).

I guess it's obvious, but I was taken by this, flaws and all. An interesting failure at worst, but at best, there’s a chance you’re one of the few people on the planet who wanted a weird sneaking game where the sneaking doesn’t quite work, with mechs, a Dead Rising style survivor system, and fumbling, but strangely prescient story.

***

LEFT ALIVE: A Future Cult Classic?, ThorHighHeels - https://youtu.be/WIGo225yEGY

One of the absolute worst games I've ever played. A complete mess filled with design flaws that make it damn near unplayable. The fact it's a stealth/survival game and there's not even a stealth takedown should tell you something. That's not even mentioning the ludicrously bullet sponge-y enemies and horrendous inconsistent AI that will either never notice you from 5 feet away or instantly notice you from 50 feet away.

Left Alive? More like better LEFT ALONE. The only good thing about this game is Yoji Shinkawa's art.

I have played 2 hours of this game, and I already know I could spend way, way longer talking about it than I ever could playing it. Somewhere beneat this absolute trainwreck there's the bones of a fun stealth action sandbox game, with cool mechs and interesting story elements. But on both a technical and gameplay level, everything is blatantly, absurdly bad, more reminiscent of fumbling around in an early access survival game from 2011 than a AAA release from Square Enix in 2019.

Just some of the questions this game has me pondering

- Why does the game drop you in an open area with dozens of guards and giant mechs with no stealth tools or real means to acquire them?

- Why is the player health so high, and why does it take 4 pistol headshots to kill a guard?

- What are these really cool, realised mechs doing in a field of such jank?

- Why is the morality system actually vaguely interesting?

- What the fuck happened here?

I must play on. Half of me wants to snap the disc in half and the other half must delve deeper, to try and work out this enigma of a game.

TL;DR: you could build a mountain out of the complaints thrown at this game, but you'd only get a molehill out of the ones that are actually valid

left alive isn't metal gear. it has a fair amount of low budget jank, but outside of the inconsistent performance, some weird animations and a few ai quirks here and there, it works as intended (if you can handle literally anything made by cavia, you'll be fine.) that said - depending on your playstyle and willingness to experiment, the experience is either gonna be totally exhilarating or completely exhausting

let's dispel the myth once and for all: not only is left alive not metal gear - it's not even a stealth game. enemies are armed to the teeth. these aren't dudes in military garb - they're soldiers with armored exosuits. it'd be stupid if you could just 'stealth takedown' them. so what's the solution, especially on higher difficulties? (read: any one that isn't the casual mode that they patched in for people who refused to play the game properly)

RUN LIKE A BITCH

oh, but if only i could easily obtain tools to distract or disarm guards to avoid the constant gunfire. if only i could plant traps or obscure my trail with smoke bombs. if only i could slide tackle into enemies while sprinting as if this were vanquish and knock them on their asses. oh wait - i can do all of that. soldiers are spongy, but the sheer amount of ways you can manipulate them justifies that. sure, it'll take eight headshots to kill someone, but what about when while they're too busy shaking off a molotov cocktail to retaliate? or trying to dismantle a barb wire trap?

on paper it might seem like you've got all the tools you need to dispose of anything, but ammo is fairly scarce and you can't carry much of it. maps are visited under different circumstances by all three characters and the loot in each area is finite. stocking up on ammo or all the scrap you can find might sound like a good idea at first, but you could be giving your other characters a much harder time for lack of preparation

narratively, i don't have a lot to say without spoilers. as a front mission fan, it's certainly cool to dicaprio_point.gif at all the familiar terminology and factions. definitely feels like there could've been more on the narrative front, but what's here is cool and the cast carrying things is surprisingly high profile - even nigh animation-less sidequest npcs are absurdly well voiced. the morality decisions are also interesting and fairly pivotal (ranging from survivors killing themselves because you told them the wrong things, to actually important characters dying unjustly for your actions). i like that what you get out of the narrative is reflective of what you put into it. moreover, i appreciate that because this is a front mission game i can pilot wanzers. that's pretty cool too

look. if you're still here then your curiosity must be sparked in some manner. i'll be frank: this game gets cheap. i bought it for $6 and i'd have gladly paid multiples of that. there are great ideas here and they're not even deeply buried under jank. this is just a fun and unique experience through and through. easily recommended to anyone with passing interest and an open mind. play on the hopeless difficulty too - it isn't - it puts you in the right mentality to get through novo slava as intended. don't sweat the side missions too much - they're tough and staying alive is hard enough as is

moral of this story: never fucking trust game critics or youtube funnymen. seriously. most of the negative reviews on steam have less than an hour of playtime and yet they act as if left alive assaulted their family and left no one alive

it's embarrassing

I'm a fan of PS2-era action/stealth games and despite hearing all of the concerns about this one going in, I genuinely felt it was a case of people just not really understanding this type of game in the same way *I* do. Just take a second to have a look at the names involved in this shitshow. How can it be bad?

It was shite. Slow, frustrating, confusing and not by design but because of wild inconsistencies in what you can and can't get away with. Some enemies barely notice you setting off explosions directly behind them and some will hear you from across the map and snipe your moustache off before you even know they're there.

They patched in a setting that makes the game much easier but all this means is that you die slower when the game randomly decides you weren't stealthy enough.

Gets a star for some nice box art, otherwise dreadful.