As we recover from an extended hands-on with Alien: Isolation, we find the time to appreciate a slower pace and a faster heartbeat…
Perhaps the most telling element of Alien: Isolation was amplified in our most recent hands-on with the game. If Isolation was a routine first-person shooter, the list of missions would have taken about 15 minutes – all we had to do was track down some medical supplies to help patch up a wounded colleague. But nothing is that simple or straightforward in Alien: Isolation and, in this ongoing game of uber-cat and blindfolded mouse, this short sequence of events took us more than three hours.
The unkillable and often unavoidable threat is almost constant, and with that comes an ongoing sense of fear and dread. It’s a feeling that will have you jumping into lockers and other hiding spots as a nervous reflex and being afraid of your own imagination. Not that Alien: Isolation is completely one-paced and in our hands-on session there were moments where we didn’t feel overly threatened and could explore with relative freedom. But at the same time, we were still wary about running unnecessarily (for any kind of noise acts as an alert to the threat that is rarely going to be too far away) and kept the Motion Tracker as a near constant companion.
There has been much lamentation about the demise of true horror in gaming, and whether Alien: Isolation is about to change that may depend on how you react to this more oppressive and measured approach. We could liken it to the original Dead Space in terms of being afraid of the dark and the bad things that you just know are lurking around the next corner, but this is a different sense of fear; a fear of making one mistake and winding up very, very dead as a result. Because once you’re in the Alien’s sight, there’s precious little you can do about it. Fighting is futile (you can’t kill it, so save your ammo for the additional human threat on board) and you’ll need to move very fast to a nearby hiding spot if you want to make a run for it.
It’s this sense of impending doom that might detract from the fear a little; the acceptance that death is unavoidable and so merely becomes an annoying frustration as you’re forced to replay sections over and over. At more than one point we acknowledged that the Alien had us nailed and simply swore under our breath, put the pad down and let it do its horrific worst. The flipside is that if you do manage to survive a section, whether through the game’s excellent combination of potential tactics and skill or just plain luck and courage, Alien: Isolation becomes a hugely rewarding experience and one that you will be reluctant to walk away from.
For those of you who haven’t been following the game, Alien: Isolation is set 15 years after the events of Ridley Scott’s iconic film. You play as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen, on a search to find out what happened to her mother and the rest of the Nostromo crew. This takes her (and her crew, so you’re not completely alone in this) to a decommissioned trading station called Sevastopol and it’s here that you wind up stranded with one angry Alien and a group of human mercenaries. Many of these mercs will shoot on sight, others might be willing to let you go about your business as they’re equally fearful of the Alien threat, but none of them should be readily trusted.
Our latest hands-on was from a good few hours into the storyline, with Ripley’s crew separated and one in need of medical attention. By this point Amanda had acquired a rudimentary armoury through the game’s crafting system (collect items and then use blueprints to find ways to combine them into various tools), including flares, EMPs, flashbangs, smoke bombs and a noisemaker. Some of these items have obvious uses – EMPs being useful for stunning any aggressive androids that you encounter, for example – but Isolation enables, or even forces, you to get creative in finding ways to distract and manipulate the environment to your advantage.
It might be something as simple as using a flashbang to disorientate the Alien, or throwing a noisemaker down one corridor (which the Alien will duly investigate) while you sneak off down another, but as your inventory expands so does your list of options. This also include weapons, and there will be more traditional FPS moments if you decide to tackle a group of mercs head-on, but ammo is scarce so it’s not something that you’ll be doing too often.
Besides, why use guns when you have a ten-foot-tall killing machine running around? The Alien is just as brutal and relentless in taking out the mercenaries and there’s a simple, gleeful joy in hearing it clambering around the vents above you and then lobbing a noisemaker in the general direction of a group of human enemies up ahead. As the Alien leaps down and the masses scatter (while you stay very well hidden, obviously) it’s brilliant watching the carnage unfold, maybe catching the odd kill first-hand or just watching blips on your Tracker scatter with two blips tearing right and only one returning.
There is plenty of fun to be had, then, but mostly Alien: Isolation is about tip-toeing your way around its superbly stylised recreation of a typical Alien setting. For about the first ten minutes of our session we were happily walking around, searching areas and gathering resources, but once the Alien dropped down from a vent with beautiful menace (and accompanied by an iconic soundtrack) that was it for the next three hours, which had us basically crawling for two of them.
In these moments the Alien is a persistent threat and will often remain in the same area, constantly searching for you. It’s a bit frustrating at times, when we seemed to be spending more time hiding in lockers or crouched under desks than actually making any real progress, but then that sense of impending doom is exactly the point. Each inch gained and every corridor navigated is to be hard-fought and achingly satisfying. The sense of relief when the Alien finally gave up its hunt and took to the vents for the final hour or so, and we took a slightly more set-piece based escape to relative safety, was huge.
The Alien was still around and we still got jumped on several occasions after alerting it to our presence by making undue noise, or by missing some telltale visual clues such as its acidic drool dripping down from an overhead opening. However, there are some basic puzzle-solving elements to mix things up, the mercenary threat to twist that fear into adrenaline and a good deal of looting and crafting to keep you occupied when you’re not busy being afraid of the dark.
However, Alien: Isolation remains a game like precious few others; a game where the true power lies with your enemy and your only goal is to survive long enough to finally make a difference. And if that means crawling around in the dark for three hours just to secure some medical supplies, then we’re more than happy to do so.
FORMAT: PS3, PS4, X360, XOne, PC
PUBLISHER: Sega
DEVELOPER: The Creative Assembly
RELEASED: 07 October 2014