Aliens: Dark Descent review – a modern day bug hunt

Aliens: Dark Descent – this time it’s war (Picture: Focus Entertinment)

The best Aliens game since Alien Isolation may take its inspiration from XCOM but it’s an impressively original game in its own right.

The obvious assumption about any video game that releases broken at launch is that the publisher must’ve known and is simply pushing it out as soon as possible, hoping that people would buy it anyway and that they’ll be able to fix it later. It seems inconceivable that they couldn’t know and yet the only version of Aliens: Dark Descent that was sent for review before launch was the PC version which, as you might guess by the fact that we’ve raised the subject, is in a terrible state.

We only received a PlayStation 5 copy on Tuesday morning, but while we’ve obviously not had enough time with it to judge the whole game it seems immediately less bug-ridden than the PC version. Publishers do have to rely on console manufacturers to provide review copies, so that’s not necessarily Focus Entertainment’s fault, but it’s a very unfortunate situation for a game that otherwise seems to get so much right.

Like any long-running movie franchise, there have been good Alien video games and there have been bad ones, but never anything that could claim to be definitive. That’s frustrating for a series that has had such a profound effect on gaming, but ever since Halo ripped off the look of its military from Aliens it’s become increasingly difficult for an official tie-in to make an impact. So, the idea of an XCOM style strategy game is a welcome new approach.

The idea that strategy games can be tense, or even frightening, may seem peculiar to those that aren’t fans of the genre but anyone’s that’s seen a mission in XCOM go down to the wire, as trusted soldiers, that you’ve kept alive for the whole game, drop like flies and everything comes down to the last couple of shots, will know differently. Dark Descent is by no means a clone of XCOM but it’s very obvious that’s where the idea for the game has come from.

In actual fact, Dark Descent is a very unusual and innovative strategy game, since it’s not turn-based and while you can pause the action at any time it technically all runs in real-time. That’s not a unique concept but it means that while XCOM is the most obvious point of reference this also has something in common with old squad-based shooters like Full Spectrum Warrior – especially in the fact that you’re not controlling anyone specifically but the team as a whole.

Most Alien games tend to have the same general plot but while this doesn’t start promisingly, as a space station becomes purposefully infected with aliens, it’s a little less predictable than usual, as you face not just evil corporations but also misguided cultists. The dialogue and voice-acting isn’t top draw but, like most things in the game, it’s better than you’d imagine.

The interesting thing is that while this is specifically based on Aliens, Dark Descent also has a lot in common with Alien Isolation – which is easily the best of the modern tie-ins. The game isn’t just tense because you don’t want to lose (and Dark Descent is pretty hard, even for strategy veterans) but because it plays up to the horror roots of the franchise.

While most Aliens adaptations quickly devolve into mindless shooters, Dark Descent realises that that’s exactly what got all the marines killed in the movie. So here you’re much better off trying to sneak around, hiding when you can and only using short, controlled bursts when you have to.

Cover is important in most strategy games but here you’re using it to stay out of sight as much as anything else, since the moment an alien senses you a line is drawn onscreen between you and them and you’ve only got a few second before it turns from yellow to red, which means that it’s spotted you and is about to attack.

You then only have a short window to take it down before it not only overwhelms your soldiers but alerts the rest of the hive, which is not something you want to happen. No matter how sneaky you are though the frequency and variety of aliens is always gradually increasing, with a timer indicating when specific set pieces will trigger – the most dangerous being an Onslaught, which is basically a siege inspired by Hudson’s last stand in the movie.

This all works extremely well and whether you’ve got your back to the wall, trying to survive an Onslaught, or you’re desperately trying to escape and get to your extraction point it feels like the best parts of strategy, action, and survival horror games all wrapped up into one.

We’re not familiar with French developer Tindalos Interactive – their most significant releases before this seems to be Warhammer 40,000 games Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 1 and 2 – but they’ve done an excellent job in terms of not only creating a unique style of strategy hybrid but adapting so many elements of the original movie. The references aren’t cheap nostalgia bait but an intrinsic part of the gameplay, from the use of the iconic motion tracker to soldiers gradually losing their nerve through panicked assertions that it’s ‘Game over, man!’

The latter does feel more like a rough draft rather than a fully realised concept though, and not just because the game keeps repeating famous movie lines until you’re sick of hearing them. Rather than being portrayed through dialogue, and recreating the interpersonal conflicts of the movie, the stress of characters is really only represented via a series of debuffs, which has an important effect mechanical but not dramatically.

That’s likely more a budgetary issue than anything else, but despite the game clearly having to work within certain means the graphics are surprisingly good. There’s a successful attempt to not only mimic the physical appearance of the cinematic world but the specific lighting techniques and colour palette from the movie, which are identifiably those of James Cameron and not Ridley Scott.

More than any action game, this feels just like the movie in terms of the pacing and the slow build-up and that’s a wonderful thing for fans of the film. Some elements are more video game-y though, with an XCOM style strategy layer back at your crashed spaceship, where you try to heal and train new soldiers, while researching technologies and alien creatures.

You don’t get the sense the level of experience makes as much difference as it would in XCOM but there’s a good variety of class types, including ones ripped straight from the film, such as the smartgunner and tecker. The interface for all this is a bit fussy and unintuitive, and you do get the impression it wouldn’t exist if XCOM hadn’t done it already, but if nothing else it’s a welcome palette cleanser between missions.

In terms of bugs there’s a variety of problems, including mission objectives not triggering and things like safe rooms not reducing stress. From what we’ve played of the PlayStation 5 version though these issues don’t seem to be evident at all, including purely graphical issues like poor lip synching. We’re not saying that they’re completely fixed, because we haven’t had time to replay the whole thing again, but the idea of the console version suffering little or no bugs while the PC edition is far more broken is a sadly familiar one.

Aliens: Dark Descent – better than most of the movie sequels (Picture: Focus Entertinment)

The end result of all this is that the score below flatters the PC version at launch but likely underplays the console edition. Such is the nature of game reviews over the last year though, where broken PC games have become the accepted norm and it requires a work of pure clairvoyance to know whether it will ever be properly fixed. For that reason, we can’t recommend the PC edition at the moment, not until there’s a substantial patch.

At some point, this should end up being one of the best Aliens games ever made, and one of the most interestingly unique strategy games of recent years. The problem is we won’t know for sure until weeks or months from now. Once again, we’re left to lament the fact that releasing a game in full working order seems to be such an alien concept to so many publishers.

Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5
Price: £34.99
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Developer: Tindalos Interactive
Release Date: 20th June 2023
Age Rating: 16

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The best Aliens game since Alien Isolation may take its inspiration from XCOM but it’s an impressively original game in its own right.