Alien: Isolation (PS4) - Thoughts

Alien: Isolation – Thoughts (PS4)

Alien: Isolation is a game I probably won’t be able to finish. Is it better than Colonial Marines? Is it scary? Are the negative reviews it’s been getting from some sites accurate? Find out after the jump!

From its initial announcement, I’d been excited about Alien: Isolation. I’ve always been a pretty big fan of the films (particularly the first), and it looked as though the game would be a pretty accurate representation of the world that Ridley Scott directed us through in his 1979 film, Alien. Now that the game has been released, and I’ve had a pretty decent amount of time to play it, I can say with all certainty that it is. However, that may be its biggest downfall.

Somewhat like the original film, Isolation has the perfect blend of slow, building tension and well-done payoffs to that tension.  The problem lies in the fact that the main campaign is somewhere around 20 hours long. While yes, that could be seen as a good thing, given that one usually wants to get the most out of his/her $59.99 for a single game, there’s only so much slow-burning tension that one can take before it becomes outright frustrating!

In a recent posting of the Penny Arcade webcomic, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins humorously criticized their opening hours of playing the game, and how you literally play for a little over an hour before you actually see the famously frightening, titular creature. As Holkins’ comic strip alter-ego Tycho suggests after Krahulik’s Gabe complains about this, “It's called suspense, Gabriel. And they are building it. Soon, you will know fear.” Personally, I’m fine with not seeing the Alien for that long, as it does lend itself very well to the feeling of the original film.
(To see the Penny Arcade comic, click here!)

After said hour or so, the Alien makes his big reveal, and it’s done extremely well; he drops out of a ventilation duct and slowly rises to his feet, immediately beginning his hunt for you. Whenever he appears, the best thing – the ONLY thing – to do is hide. If it sees you, you can kiss your video game life goodbye and begin loading up your last save point, hoping that it was close enough to the point where you died. In other words, it kills you immediately; you can't hurt it.

The first couple of times that this happens really aren’t that bad. But when the game starts throwing objectives at you that are literally “go get the thing in this room and put it in the room next-door, so that you can open a door all the way across the level’s map,” it gets frustrating while constantly having to avoid the Alien and certain death.
In my opinion, a better approach would have been to design the game in such a way that the Alien doesn’t always show up and hamper your objectives. Instead, have him show up when you least expect it. The way it is, you can always tell he’s going to pop out when your objective is to get somewhere in a hurry, or when the objective is seemingly simple.

In all fairness, this kind of gameplay is what makes these kinds of games these kinds of games. Titles like Outlast and the Amnesia series all have that “constant tension,” but something about this type of gameplay for more than a few hours just becomes maddening. It’s probably the fact that, while slow-burning tension works very well in a two-hour movie, a twenty-hour game like that only makes you want to shut it off after two hours.

Is the game scary? I personally don’t think so, even though I’ve always considered the Alien to be the scariest movie monster of all time. And here, it acts exactly as you would expect it to - hiding and crawling through the station's ductwork, carefully seeking you out, etc. There are plenty of jump-scares, yet nothing that I was actually “terrified” over.
The Silent Hills (P.T.) demo on PS4 was frightening – this is not.
That being said, the game makes me extremely nervous, but only because I don’t want the Alien to kill me in one shot and make me start waaaaaaaaay back at the last save point I found.
And it’s for that reason that I probably won’t finish the game – I’m “on the edge of my seat,” but not for the reasons I’m probably supposed to be.

So there you have it – my thoughts on Alien: Isolation. In a sense, the reviews have been accurate, or at least they align with my own personal experience playing the game, and it's definitely a more polished effort then the last Alien game, Colonial Marines. However, I think IGN’s review in particular was pretty harsh, seeing as how they gave it a 5.9.
Through I don’t like reviewing games until after I’ve finished them, I’d probably give it a 7.5/10. The graphics are great (even though the PS4 version suffers from frame-rate problems during cutscenes), the controls work well for the type of game it is, and the game makes you feel as though you actually are living a part of the Alien universe. So in the sense of being a game which accurately represents the feeling of Ridley Scott’s original film, Alien: Isolation delivers. Unfortunately, it’s like watching Alien on DVD or BluRay 10 times in a row; it’s a great movie, but after the second or third time watching it, you’d probably want to watch something else.

-Josh

Note: If you have the Nostromo Edition of Alien: Isolation (or want to buy the DLC), play the Crew Expendable mission and the Last Survivor pre-order bonus. You’ll be able to see pretty much all that the game has to offer in a much shorter amount of time, meaning that the slow-burn feeling the game strives for is much more effective. 

Note 2: Looking for a good Alien game? Go check out Alien vs. Predator for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC/Steam. It’s short, but it’s effective, doesn’t get boring, and you can even choose to play as the Alien!