Alien: Isolation (2014) Review
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played on ps4
developed by Creative Assembly
published by Sega
review published on 21/06/2024
Alien: Isolation breaks its own fine china.
Sevastopol. A floating space fortress, designed to a meticulous degree. Gears shift, fuel consumed, beads of sweat sweated, all to maintain the well oiled machine manned by an organised effort for human endeavour. Androids, humans, and machines work to serve grand goals. Sevastopol is a symbol of advanced science and human-centricity. Its expansive engineering forms an aggressive technologic imagined future of progress. Owning Earth is not enough, we must own space itself. From the beeps and boops of the retro futuristic computers to the crumbling circuitry sparks etching burns to your face, the game space is a virtual place calling itself Sevastopol. You, Amanda Ripley, are tasked to visit Sevastopol. It's not all what it's cracked up to be. Ugly truths unsheathed, struggling to breathe. A snowball of failings paved the way for horror, crystalised by an unknown hostile creature. Those who hold Alien: Isolation in high regard may be seen calling the game as one of the most ‘immersive’ video games. This statement needs to be challenged. It is a bit disingenuous to state this. Did we play the same video game?
Alien: Isolation wants you to bask in its world, slowly inching your way forward through its eerie setting while marvelling at the visual and aural platter of Sevastopol. A once thriving space place, bordering on utopia, has become a dying dog waiting to be put down. Pacing down trashed common areas and nonfunctioning workstations provokes thoughts of the past, envisioning once alive peoples interacting and sharing in this place. However, its core feature constantly ejects you from ever fully immersing yourself, the alien.
A brooding creature, the tall alien stalks you throughout your journey. Your nifty motion radar always alerts you with its beeps to the proximity of the creature, but this only briefly assures you. As you hear the alien bouncing in nearby vents, you immediately scan for exit routes and hiding spaces. You never feel safe. The alien is always nearby, never far away in your thoughts. While you traverse Sevastopol, you will break open locks with your hard maintenance jack, access computer terminals to find out what is going on, and blast doors with your ion torch. You feel like you are an engineer, not a hero. Doing your job isn’t enough, the alien hates everyone, even workers.
When the alien eventually spots you, you are already dead, an instant death. The first couple of deaths are shocking, you feel utterly powerless and you start to wonder how in the world are you going to survive. The alien will give you a hard time. You can choose to hide, or scare it off with some fire. You could be in a designated hiding spot only for the alien to savagely snap towards your general direction, full speed charging, instantly killing you in your new metal locker home. Alien, this is why you weren’t invited to the housewarming party.
You cannot afford to move quickly or act loudly because the Alien will appear instantly and eat you. The alien’s AI (Alien Intelligence) is harsh. Even when moving slowly and quietly, the randomness of the AI means the alien can spawn right next to you, giving you no chance to hide and avoid death. In these instances, there is zero counterplay. Don’t make the same mistake as I did and listen to an audio log while saving at a save point because if you keep dying in that area, that same audio log will replay, every, single, time. Just wait for the audio log to finish, THEN save, so you can die in peace and only go slightly insane. These annoyances only add to the pile of misery in playing Alien: Isolation. The game quickly becomes VERY frustrating, and it never lets up.
You will die a lot in Alien: Isolation. The trial and error aspects of the game are masked by an obtuse level of perceived and literal randomness. It is hard to differentiate when you made a genuine mistake or the game just fancied killing you. Maybe you did everything correctly, but it doesn’t matter, you die anyway. You are never even sure if you did it correctly at all, forever interrogating the game. You never feel like you are getting to grips with the core of the hiding sneaking game. Sometimes you hide sneak good, do it again and hide sneak bad. As the deaths stack up, you realise there is no catharsis in these failure states. Just when you think the story is going somewhere, it always moves the goalposts, power up this machine, now find a device, wait for the little green man before crossing the road. The errors outweigh the trials. Its blatant padding is tedious, leaving you bewildered and unsatisfied. Alien: Isolation drops the facade, the actual look of the game is a face of thunder, a mean spirited spat. The game is playing you like a damn fiddle.
The most egregious moment that cemented my opinion about this video game happened during a heart pounding section of gameplay. I successfully ninja around the alien and human threats. After carefully avoiding everyone like a scared shadow, finally, the coast is clear. I double check, this is it, the chance I can escape. The game moment I have been chasing for, locked in, this feels very cool! I quietly beeline to the elevator, I see the end of the section, yes, YES, when out of thinair the alien jumps down from the ceiling vent right in front of me and stares at me, I have nowhere to go. I die. I need to repeat the whole section again. I got bullied. A cruel joke. What’s worse, is that if the weapon selection / weapon wheel mechanic was more snappy and responsive, I could have thrown a last second molotov at the alien, creating a clutch gaming memory. In my panic, the weapon wheel selected the wrong thing by a fraction of a millimetre. It wasn’t meant to be. I replay the section, get to the part where I died, ready for the alien this time, and it doesn’t appear. None of it mattered. My preparation was futile. That possible gaming moment is gone forever. A chance for something positive, thwarted by bad design. The alien is always one step ahead of me. I am a chump, and the game thrives off it, like a big ugly bully.
There are a few moments in the latter half of the game that have some cruel design. For example, when the facehugger enemies have been established (another instant kill creature), you need to enter a small room with a locked door to progress the story. To do this you need to manoeuvre around a human enemy by stealthing around, restore power to the door then enter the room. As soon as you open that door, you get ambushed by one facehugger. If you don’t react in that split second, instant death, load game, and you need to do that whole section again. Before that moment, there was no signpost to suggest there would be a threat in that room. Sadness. Later on in that same section, I narrowly stealth my way around the alien and hopped into the tram train, nice gamer moment. Now, there is a great distance between me and the alien. Bye bye, alien. As I got off at my destination and turned the corner, the alien was standing there, looking blankly at me. Déjà vu. We watched each other for two seconds, I let go of my controller, accepting my fate and died the same horrible death. I rub my face, exhaling upwards to the ceiling trying to sooth my seething rage. I return to the game, loading back into the world, a victim of rampant RNG and a teleporting alien.
These frustrating moments happen too often in the game. I lost count. It is unbearable to think about. After a couple of hours of gameplay, I was no longer scared, I was annoyed, to the point I was exclaiming “This game SUCKS!” everytime I face an unjust death. Salt overload. Instead of allowing me to immerse myself, I am too fixated on the frustration. Judging by the HowLongToBeat Alien: Isolation page the main story is chunky, 18 ½ hours of chunk. For a single player game of this nature it is quite lengthy. How much of that time is repeating the same section of gameplay due to deaths is unclear, but I can hazard a guess that it is a significant portion of game time. Padded beyond belief. It's way longer than any of the films.
On that note, I have failed to mention the elephant in the room. Alien: Isolation Is based on the Alien franchise. I am confident that if you are a fan of the franchise then you are going to have a great time with the game. REMEMBER ELLEN RIPLEY?? Its referentiality will give you a big boost to keep going if you’re a die hard Alien fan, enjoy dying a lot for your quest for references.
No matter how pretty Sevastopol was, the vast attention to detail of its environments, and the satisfying roleplaying aspects of being an engineer, Alien: Isolation forces you to focus on the alien. The game becomes busy work, chasing goalposts, watching many of the same kill animations, trapped by loading screens, and replaying the same sections. The alien wants you to notice it, beaming with joy for being the talk of the town, deriving pleasure from the suffering of its players, attention seeking for pure selfishness. Alien: Isolation deliberately pushes its greatest strengths to the back of the line to satisfy the family’s favourite alien child. An unrewarding game that treats you like a doormat, ungrateful in its design. Alien: Isolation got into my head and slowly killed my brain.
