Game Preview: Alien Isolation

In a world full of triple-A action games and first class survival horror games, it seems baffling that we haven’t taken all our experience and skill in either genre and applied it to the Alien’s franchise yet.  Despite all the attempts to make a good Aliens game, be it action-heavy or with an emphasis on survival and horror, we’ve only succeeded once, and that was 1999’s Aliens Versus Predator.    The rest could either be called mediocre (Aliens Infestation), bad (Alien Resurrection), or a travesty (Aliens: Colonial Marines). In many respects I suppose it could be likened to Superman, something about this franchise makes it really difficult to translate properly into the gaming medium.

When I first heard of Alien: Isolation, my first thought was that it was strange to try again so quickly after the most recent game, the aforementioned Colonial Maries, failed so spectacularly.   But then I saw it was being published by Sega and suddenly that particular mystery made a lot more sense.  But in the time since then I’ve been keeping an eye on it (I like the developer, The Creative Assembly, but mostly they make real-time strategy games so I was curious how they’d do in survival horror) and now that I’m officially excited for it, I figure it would be a good time for an Alien Isolation game preview!



One of the most important letters in the Alien franchise is the letter S. 

...wow that was a weak opening, but still.  There was a huge shift in tone between Alien, the movie that started it all, and Aliens, the subsequent sequel.  It seems Xenomorphs are a lot like ninjas in that one is threatening, but a swarm is cannon fodder.  So, as the name suggests, in Alien, there’s just going to be one Xenomorph: and before you start counting your Assault Rifle ammunition, you won’t be getting any real weapons in this game, and an unarmed human to a Xenomorph is like a six year old to Bruce Lee!

Still, it won’t be exactly like, say, Slender or Amnisia, where all you can do is stumble around in darkness and pray: you’ll be able to craft tools and very simple weapons that might give you a little more survivability as you navigate the city-sized space station the game takes place in.  One tool we know will be in the game is a handheld but cumbersome motion tracker that can show you moving objects on a 2-D plain in a cone in front of you.  Useful if a Xenomorph is crawling through some air vents to try and grab you.



But more than just a Xenomorph want to kill you, I’m afraid.   There are also other survivors of the Alien attack onboard the space station Sevastopol—and while some might be happy to see another friendly face, others are decidedly less so.  You’ll have to figure out how to survive these demented people as well.  With any luck they won’t be in the air vents too.

The plot of the game has been kept under tight wraps by the folks at Creative Assembly, but there is some stuff we do know. The game takes place 15 years after the original Alien movie, and stars Amanda, who is on the hunt for her missing mother Ripley after the company she works for, Weyland-Yutani, claims they found a black box pointing to her location.  Of course, this being an Alien game, we can safely assume that Wayland-Yutani is up to no good, but since we have to find our mother anyway we might as well deal with that as it comes along.



Indeed, for a game called Isolation, you’re not isolated all that often.  Other than survivors you encounter on Sevastopol, there is a small handful of supporting cast to watch you get eaten by the Xenomorph countless times.  Such as Samuels, the company representative who contacts you about Ripley, Verlaine and Taylor, whose roles are unknown at the moment, and Richardo, your standard-issue voice-over-the-PA.



Aliens: Isolation will be released October 7^th this year, and with any luck between now and then we’ll get some more information about the Sevastopol and the tools you’ll use to survive your first-degree encounters with extraterrestrials.  In the meantime, though, I suppose I’ll just have to see if I can find Aliens Verses Predator on Good Old Games… Now I’ve got a hankering to play that again.