- 26 hours played
- Normal Difficulty
Aliens Dark Descent has to be one of the most brutal and unforgiving games I have ever played. Every aspect of the game is absolutely trying its hardest to beat you down. It’s an isometric, strategy game. You have a squad of 4 marines (5 later on) with which you embark on missions. You aim a cursor and press square to tell the marines where to go. You can have them sprint, take cover and perform a variety of special skill/class based actions. The missions are long and most of the time very gruelling.
There’s permadeath. So say bye bye to your marines forever if they get killed or kidnapped by Xenomorph’s. Each marine has a stress meter. If this gets too high they develop trauma. Trauma granting the marine negative traits such as taking stress damage when Aliens are around. Or a marine being an hypochondriac who takes stress damage when there’s no health kits in your inventory. There’s numerous Traumas to deal with and none of them are fun. That’s on top of each marine developing a negative trait of their own outside of and on top of Trauma. For example one of my marines was a bully, any marine on a lower level than the bully would take stress damage due to his presence. I also had a marine who would fire one extra ammo per burst of his rifle and that extra burst would always miss, costing me resources. Marines get injured. End up in Coma’s or lose limbs. Need to be carried to escape or saved from becoming an incubator via facehugger. And that’s just the stress from the marines aspect of the game. The levels don’t help.
That’s because every level has something different to offer. There’s 12 levels in total. You begin by exploring and uncovering the fog of war on the map. Your motion tracker beeps and alerts you to threats. You inch down hallways and check out abandoned facilities. It’s extremely tense and immersive. Missions have unique boss battles. Infinite horde sections that only end when an objective is complete. Horde mode style map defense for an allotted time. Stealth sections that work surprisingly well in this type of game. And mad dash sprints to the exit away from explosions or rampaging Xeno’s. Every mission has a meter at the top of the screen that fills up after combat. This will eventually level up from easy to medium where resistance gets a little tougher. To hard where it’s required for you to book it back to the escape vehicle and get out of there to redeploy another day. Missions take their toll on supplies and marines so you are allowed to make progress and then return to the ship. You can return to the mission and carry on where you left off after a day has passed. And here we get to even more stress management.
The Otago. Your base of operations. It’s here you spend time before and after missions. You can heal marines in the med bay. Upgrade weapons. Level up marines. Marines take actual in game days to heal injuries and you have a very limited amount of doctors per day to reduce the days needed to heal a marine. You can skip a day and return to a mission. But and it’s a big BUT. When you skip a day, there’s a little meter at the bottom of the screen that increases by 1 notch per day. After enough days have passed, the overall infestation of the planet will increase therefore making future mission deployments harder. Also after mission 5 this game introduces a death clock. 25 days to utter annihilation and game over. An actual save file failure. Many, many hours of game wasted if you happen to fall prey to this. Luckily I managed to beat the game with 10 days left but that was because I really knuckled down on missions 7, 8 and 9 and beat them in 1 deployment each.
So the game hates you and your marines. It wants you dead and puts you on the clock. Things always feel like they’re falling apart and I bloody loved this game. The story is very weak and plays with alien lore. Some may hate the unique beasts this game throws your way but I enjoyed them. The cutscenes are awful and facial animations are a few generations behind but overall in game graphics are quite nice. The ending I found very lacking. And it’s not an inviting game difficulty wise, even on normal. You can turn the death clock off but doing so forgoes trophies for completing the game. I didn’t want that.
There’s a lot of bugs as well and I don’t mean Xenomorphs. Character abilities missing off the skill screen menu which prevented me using them during the mission. Enemies bugging out in T pose. Button prompts not working no matter how much I spammed them, forcing a restart of the game. And don’t get me started on the god awful save system. There’s no manual save. You’re at the mercy of the auto save. You can save by welding a door shut and resting in a room (this also relieves stress) but this isn’t always possible. Dying sometimes meaning you have to repeat vast chunks of already completed sections. But despite this, Aliens Dark Descent was a great 26 hours spent gaming.
- Normal Difficulty
Aliens Dark Descent has to be one of the most brutal and unforgiving games I have ever played. Every aspect of the game is absolutely trying its hardest to beat you down. It’s an isometric, strategy game. You have a squad of 4 marines (5 later on) with which you embark on missions. You aim a cursor and press square to tell the marines where to go. You can have them sprint, take cover and perform a variety of special skill/class based actions. The missions are long and most of the time very gruelling.
There’s permadeath. So say bye bye to your marines forever if they get killed or kidnapped by Xenomorph’s. Each marine has a stress meter. If this gets too high they develop trauma. Trauma granting the marine negative traits such as taking stress damage when Aliens are around. Or a marine being an hypochondriac who takes stress damage when there’s no health kits in your inventory. There’s numerous Traumas to deal with and none of them are fun. That’s on top of each marine developing a negative trait of their own outside of and on top of Trauma. For example one of my marines was a bully, any marine on a lower level than the bully would take stress damage due to his presence. I also had a marine who would fire one extra ammo per burst of his rifle and that extra burst would always miss, costing me resources. Marines get injured. End up in Coma’s or lose limbs. Need to be carried to escape or saved from becoming an incubator via facehugger. And that’s just the stress from the marines aspect of the game. The levels don’t help.
That’s because every level has something different to offer. There’s 12 levels in total. You begin by exploring and uncovering the fog of war on the map. Your motion tracker beeps and alerts you to threats. You inch down hallways and check out abandoned facilities. It’s extremely tense and immersive. Missions have unique boss battles. Infinite horde sections that only end when an objective is complete. Horde mode style map defense for an allotted time. Stealth sections that work surprisingly well in this type of game. And mad dash sprints to the exit away from explosions or rampaging Xeno’s. Every mission has a meter at the top of the screen that fills up after combat. This will eventually level up from easy to medium where resistance gets a little tougher. To hard where it’s required for you to book it back to the escape vehicle and get out of there to redeploy another day. Missions take their toll on supplies and marines so you are allowed to make progress and then return to the ship. You can return to the mission and carry on where you left off after a day has passed. And here we get to even more stress management.
The Otago. Your base of operations. It’s here you spend time before and after missions. You can heal marines in the med bay. Upgrade weapons. Level up marines. Marines take actual in game days to heal injuries and you have a very limited amount of doctors per day to reduce the days needed to heal a marine. You can skip a day and return to a mission. But and it’s a big BUT. When you skip a day, there’s a little meter at the bottom of the screen that increases by 1 notch per day. After enough days have passed, the overall infestation of the planet will increase therefore making future mission deployments harder. Also after mission 5 this game introduces a death clock. 25 days to utter annihilation and game over. An actual save file failure. Many, many hours of game wasted if you happen to fall prey to this. Luckily I managed to beat the game with 10 days left but that was because I really knuckled down on missions 7, 8 and 9 and beat them in 1 deployment each.
So the game hates you and your marines. It wants you dead and puts you on the clock. Things always feel like they’re falling apart and I bloody loved this game. The story is very weak and plays with alien lore. Some may hate the unique beasts this game throws your way but I enjoyed them. The cutscenes are awful and facial animations are a few generations behind but overall in game graphics are quite nice. The ending I found very lacking. And it’s not an inviting game difficulty wise, even on normal. You can turn the death clock off but doing so forgoes trophies for completing the game. I didn’t want that.
There’s a lot of bugs as well and I don’t mean Xenomorphs. Character abilities missing off the skill screen menu which prevented me using them during the mission. Enemies bugging out in T pose. Button prompts not working no matter how much I spammed them, forcing a restart of the game. And don’t get me started on the god awful save system. There’s no manual save. You’re at the mercy of the auto save. You can save by welding a door shut and resting in a room (this also relieves stress) but this isn’t always possible. Dying sometimes meaning you have to repeat vast chunks of already completed sections. But despite this, Aliens Dark Descent was a great 26 hours spent gaming.