Like the chestburster in John Hurt's abdomen, it took a few days for my thoughts on Alien: Isolation to gestate. It's certainly one of the more interesting and bold Triple A titles I've played in a while but it's also one not without, in my opinion, considerable structural flaws.
You play as Amanda Ripley (Ellen's daughter mentioned in deleted scene from Aliens) who travels to a backwater space station called Sevastopol to collect the Nostromo's black box. After making a dramatic space walk to land on the station you start to learn all is not right in this sleepy backwater... mostly because an alien has eaten everyone. SPOILERS!
Casting the player in the role of Ripley Jr still seems like an odd move to me, or at least one that the story never really exploits. It can feel like the only reason it was done was so the player can be addressed as Ripley to further cement "THIS IS AN ALIEN GAME". There are no thematic reasons for it and the story concerning the black box (and thus the entire point of being on the station) is wrapped up six hours before the game ends.
It's a shame that the plot falls away so badly because the team at Creative Assembly have done an amazing job of recreating the late 70's industrial feel of the Alien franchise. Every computer has a chunky keyboard, a green CRT monitor and information is seemingly stored on tapes. Interestingly, rather than finding this anachronistic aesthetic out of place, it helped reinforce the notion of Sevastopol as aging and outdated. The game looks and sounds like Alien and like last year's South Park game, is one of the most authentic licensed games I've ever played.
So it looks like an Alien game and sounds like an Alien game. But does it feel like one? The answer is a yes but with a big asterisk next to it.
For me, how well the gameplay works depends on two things: how forgiving you are of the frequently sketchy AI and how much you buy into what the game is selling.
You have to accept that if the alien sees you it's pretty much a game over and therefore a reload from your last manual save. The alien is allowed freer reign over the environment that the player, which makes sense, although the player will have various tools and weapons at their disposal to if nothing else distract the alien as it's on the hunt. You also have to accept that the alien is after you first and foremost. You can use NPCs as distractions but it will move onto you very quickly afterward so don't stick around to watch the carnage. Finally you have to accept that some hiding places that would logically seem the most safe (lockers, cupboards, vents) turn out to be nothing more than metal coffins.
And I think I would be okay with all of that IF the alien was consistent in the way it hunted you to begin with.
You see the Alien, as intimidating a presence as it is, to give the illusion of it being on the hunt, CA has arranged for the alien to be beholden to some very obvious and very uncanny behavioural routines which can break the player's immersion.
This leads to some irksome situations where the Alien can walk right past you when you're ducked behind a sofa but mostly in the open (and I do mean RIGHT past, one time the bloody thing even looked at me before moving on) and sometimes will pull you out of a locker it has no reason to be investigating.
So, you die, you reload, the alien is now in corridor it wasn't in before, you die, you reload, the alien drops out of a vent right in front of you, you die, you reload, the alien pulls you out of locker, you die, you reload, the alien ignores the noisemaker you placed and runs you down, you die, you reload...etc.
For me this was my main issue with the game. You see, in a game with instadeaths situations and manual saves (like say Dark Souls) every encounter is a learning process. Each time you die, you understand a little better what it was you did wrong and can make steps to avoid that next time.
In Alien: Isolation there are no predictable patterns so you get stuck for ages with the alien seeming almost omniscient, only to then reload and find it absent allowing you to casually stroll to your next destination totally sucking the tension from the game.
And that's kind of the kicker. Because earlier on those early encounters
are tense and exciting and scary. But the more you get found by the alien and the more you study its seemingly random pattern of intercept, the less afraid of it you become.
This isn't helped by the fact the game is also about six to eight hours longer than it needs to be, meaning if you weren't sick of the Alien's tricks due to the iffy AI, you will be the twentieth time it drops into play just as you think you're finally getting somewhere.
Some have posited that the reason the game is so long is down to Sega's influence, trying to bump the title up to "official retail length". I myself think it's likely more down to a developer inexperienced with making action titles not knowing how to pace this sort of product properly. There are at least FOUR false endings in the game, a bizarre flashback excursion to LV-426 and two separate occasions on which you leave the alien infested space station, only to go back. It's not padded so much as meandering. There was one point when I turned the game on at 8am thinking I was definitely close to the end and played through til 2pm and I was still two hours off beating the damn thing.
Okay a lot of that is restarts but still, I don't think I've played a non-JRPG that took as long getting to the bastard point.
Even then, when the game seems like it's gearing up for the end, with the music becoming more intense and fast paced, it still forces you to play the game at the same pace you were at the beginning. The game does kind of show you all of what it has to offer early on and (barring some facehugger jump scares) thinks that ramping up the tension means putting you and the alien in smaller, more well lit rooms.
It just keeps going and going, breaking its own rules, breaking the rules of the franchise, getting sillier and sillier and sillier until finally you reach the end and are awarded with what is probably the most deflating ending since Mass Effect 3.
With all that being said however, I did not hate Alien: Isolation and in fact there are sections I found excellent. The Alien might be skittish but the station's other inhabitants, the creepy Working Joe synthetics, can be just as nerve wracking to face but much less prone to unpredictable behaviour.
And despite what I've said about the AI, there are instances whether by luck or design when the alien does seem like it's actually stalking you and sniffing you out and in those instances the game truly excels. It's a very technically proficient game with the atmosphere, the lighting, sound design, graphical fidelity, controls all being top shelf. There are a few glitches but none so bad as to ruin the experience (and most of them probably more to do with the 360's aging hardware than anything else).
Alien: Isolation is not a bad game at all. I was never bored with it, I never really wanted to pack it in and throw down the towel even when it started to get under my skin. It's rare these days, but it is a game that demands to be played on hard to fully experience what the developer was intending.
Most of all though the game makes you feel something toward it. Alien: Isolation is not a game you can impassively play to relax. It's the sort of game you play on the edge of your chair, leaning forwards, all senses tuned directly into it.
If you could plot my reaction hour by hour it'd be something like this:
So I am not
not recommending Alien: Isolation. I know there are plenty on this board who will love it and as many who will not. I am saying that to properly enjoy the game you will have to buy into its fiction and forgive some pretty obvious flaws.
A:I is the best Aliens game in a long time it's definitely the most true to the source material. I applaud Creative Assembly for what they attempted with the game and Sega for distributing it. After the critical and financial mauling they took on Colonial Marines, they looked to the indie scene and took a chance and that should always be praised IMO.
But intentions don't necessarily translate to success and the game is too drawn out and badly paced to be considered a genuine classic.
tldr: Alien: Isolation is more Prometheus than Alien. A staggeringly flawed masterpiece.