Aliens: Dark Descent Review (Glitch)
11h in the game, I was waiting this title for 6 months to release.
I'm an Xcom 2 fan and was utterly disappointed by gear tactics (loved gears of war fps tho). I snacked phantom brigad, a good but not great tactical title.
Alien dark descent brought everything to the table, and delivered even beyond expectation. I am trully in awe.
1. The game has an actual soul. Alien one. The atmosphere is absolutely perfect. Lightning, level design... It's everywhere and it's rare to nail so accurately this part in a tactical. This is 10/10.
2. the core mechanics are simple, solid & enjoyable.
- I was a bit scared by not microing the marines one by one and having to deal with one single entity "the squad", but its well designed, fits the map and the gameplay do not suffer from this.
- Defaulting to slow motion instead of full pause is how the game is intended to be played. It gives you the rush of decision making when it's time to shoot at something. It reinforce the alien unique ambiance. The full pause is available, yet even if you would use it in an "iron man" super hardcore run, I'm pretty sure it would remove a great part of intended stress from the game.
- Regarding the class, tech and ability tree, I'm not sure it's balanced but overall you really enjoy building. Let see how the meta will be shaped.
- I was extremely surprised by the stealth mechanics and the match with the alien franchise. In a tactical it's usually a really difficult thing to balance with AI/Spawn. They leveraged the infamous motion tracker from Alien in the gameplay and made something unique and awesomely good. Basically it fully avoid the hacky sneaky/alpha strike gameloop from xcom2 (vanilla) or other older tacticals, where stealth is a tedious micro optimisation. Here it's part of the game and greatly designed.
- The continuous missions mechanics is also extremely welcomed. Bringing a bit of "rogue like" feeling. it's a great lessons on "how to add gameplay depth" & more decision on risk management by forcing the player to play several session on the same map in a row. The amount of objective on a map is huge, and you trully enjoy the level design and play around it. Coming back several time on the same map doesn't feel like a lack of content, but a real strategical choice.
- Finally interaction in game, resource management (stress, ammo, etc), are totally in harmony with the alien experience. You don't have thousand of things to keep an eye on; but nothing is missing. "Simple" in a good way: you have only the relevant element you are expecting to play with in an alien tactical, and no cumbersome elements that were artificially added.
- The in game UI is also extremely simple but efficient. Clear enough, non disruptive, no struggle, pretty intuitive.
Very few bad points, not a lot:
1. The audio voice line & SFX are bad. Aside of the motion detector SFX which is pretty simple to get:
- The burst fire of the marine gun isn't super accurate, it's not bad, it's not great (movie as reference).
- The alien sound suffers the same, not bad, not great, not really super accurate to the movie.
- The voice are bad, they do not blend to any situation (just the sfx, the voices are studio perfect in a super noisy surrounding for instance, no reverb etc) In cinematics, in the base management, or on the field. The voice lines are out of context, and flat.
2. Marines appaearance customisation. A little bit more of option and level of option would have been a blast. Maybe DLC ?
I was spoiled by Xcom 2 there.
3. Aliens move in 2 dimensions. Adding a third dimension would change everything (and the whole game would need to be adjusted). I guess this would add a lot of depth but would also be a nightmare for the UI. Maybe for a second in the serie ? who knows ?
This title is on the way to stand next to xcom2 for me. It's almost a perfection :)