Aliens: Dark Decent is the next Alien game after the masterpiece called Alien Isolation and a fun CO-OP shooter called Aliens: Fireteam Elite. But sadly it is way worse than both of them.
So yea I'm really disappointed. I think I have to warn everyone first because this game has a “feature” that made me drop the game after spending 19h playing this game. So what's this great feature? It's a death clock, which wasn't really communicated or explained at the beginning of the game. This means I played 19 hours (which I didn't enjoy, I explaine later why) just to get a "game over, please return to main menu" screen. No cutscene or anything like that which I find really lazy and cheap. So I was forced to pretty much restart a whole new game or reload an older save file and rush through the game with no guarantee that it will be enough. I a player who loves to explore every corner of a game and I like doing side missions which I realized now is not possible because the game punishes you for this in the end. The next problem is that the whole game design doesn't really work with that kind of mechanic because it often feels like you don't have much control over what is happening. The controls are really bad, inputs are not registered or way too late which lead to your death. The KI is also not great and another big problem is that you control the whole squad and you can't really control the individual Marines. I also often had to reload segments because the Marines didn't hit the target and after doing the same segment two or three times without changing my tactics they somewho hit the target. So a huge art is just trial and error which was not fun. The Marines also died like flies when you they are in close combat which makes sense but because of that it hard to fight back once 2-3 Aliens came closer. Due to the camera positioning and controls it was often even harder and too confusing because too much was happening on screen and playing this with controller doesn't help either.
It was also annyoing to hear same three voice lines over and over again and often the messages on screen said your are safe when your are not just to throw me three more Xenomorphs into my unprepared face which then killed me so I had to replay 30 min. again. I also didn't get why there was no "continue from last save" when you are killed. You always have to go back to the main menu to reload the last save file which killed the atmosphere a little bit for me. It's sad because the atmosphere is one of the strength and I also like the motion tracker, it builds up a lot of tension just like I remember from Alien Isolation.
But the face animatios are not up to date and none of the characters are really interesting. Because of that Aliens Dark Decent is overall not a great game and many game design decisions are really frustrating. Until the "game over" screen at the end I would have probably rated this 3/5 but the "death clock" feature was the final nail in the coffin for me. I think this feature would have worked as a feature for a harder difficulty or a new game plus run but not for a first run. I understand what they were trying to do and sometimes the game some satisfying moments similar to the soulslike genre. But the game mechanics doesn't work well with the death clock, controls are not very inaccurate which make this a frustrating experience. As a huge fan of the movie Alien and the game Alien Isolation it was really disappointing to witness another bad entry.
So please just give me Alien Isolation 2 and stop creating stupid shooters out of this IP, thank you.
So yea I'm really disappointed. I think I have to warn everyone first because this game has a “feature” that made me drop the game after spending 19h playing this game. So what's this great feature? It's a death clock, which wasn't really communicated or explained at the beginning of the game. This means I played 19 hours (which I didn't enjoy, I explaine later why) just to get a "game over, please return to main menu" screen. No cutscene or anything like that which I find really lazy and cheap. So I was forced to pretty much restart a whole new game or reload an older save file and rush through the game with no guarantee that it will be enough. I a player who loves to explore every corner of a game and I like doing side missions which I realized now is not possible because the game punishes you for this in the end. The next problem is that the whole game design doesn't really work with that kind of mechanic because it often feels like you don't have much control over what is happening. The controls are really bad, inputs are not registered or way too late which lead to your death. The KI is also not great and another big problem is that you control the whole squad and you can't really control the individual Marines. I also often had to reload segments because the Marines didn't hit the target and after doing the same segment two or three times without changing my tactics they somewho hit the target. So a huge art is just trial and error which was not fun. The Marines also died like flies when you they are in close combat which makes sense but because of that it hard to fight back once 2-3 Aliens came closer. Due to the camera positioning and controls it was often even harder and too confusing because too much was happening on screen and playing this with controller doesn't help either.
It was also annyoing to hear same three voice lines over and over again and often the messages on screen said your are safe when your are not just to throw me three more Xenomorphs into my unprepared face which then killed me so I had to replay 30 min. again. I also didn't get why there was no "continue from last save" when you are killed. You always have to go back to the main menu to reload the last save file which killed the atmosphere a little bit for me. It's sad because the atmosphere is one of the strength and I also like the motion tracker, it builds up a lot of tension just like I remember from Alien Isolation.
But the face animatios are not up to date and none of the characters are really interesting. Because of that Aliens Dark Decent is overall not a great game and many game design decisions are really frustrating. Until the "game over" screen at the end I would have probably rated this 3/5 but the "death clock" feature was the final nail in the coffin for me. I think this feature would have worked as a feature for a harder difficulty or a new game plus run but not for a first run. I understand what they were trying to do and sometimes the game some satisfying moments similar to the soulslike genre. But the game mechanics doesn't work well with the death clock, controls are not very inaccurate which make this a frustrating experience. As a huge fan of the movie Alien and the game Alien Isolation it was really disappointing to witness another bad entry.
So please just give me Alien Isolation 2 and stop creating stupid shooters out of this IP, thank you.
4 Comments
@NascarRedSox I played it for 12h+ and ended it because the "timer" run out so I had to restart from the beginning. Since I had a bad time with the game, I wasn't ready to start over from the beginning.
12 hours and the deathclock ran out? I finished the game in 40 hours with 13 days left on the timer, so there's definitely something wrong with your playthrough.
@NascarRedSox I just didn't knew there was one, so I took my time to explore the map and recover my main squad when they were hurt. Then at the end I noticed that there is a death clock but it was already to late.
NascarRedSox
5 months ago
By the way, if you like Alien: Isolation, play it, and enjoy it as much as you like. Other players want something new. The "just give me what I want to play" line is childish.