Alien: Isolation

I've tried to play this several times. I cant get into it. It's boring, and sometimes I have no idea where to go. I also don't like playing as a woman. I've heard many women say they don't like playing as a man, and that they want to play as someone they can realte to. I see what they mean. I'm also tired of hearing her whining and scared. The game does look nice though, and they added a lot of details that put you into the world of Alien. The controls and movement feels like you are moving around in water. It feels mushy and slow. Not enough action. I'm hours in and still sneaking around looking for objects with which to open doors. I'm uninstalling it yet again. At least it doesn't crash on my new computer, unlike most of GOG's games.

I'd be tempted to give it 4 stars for the effort they put in. Sound design and atmosphere are great, graphics and pacing are kinda OK. The polygon edges are so obvious/annoying that this is the only game where I absolutely have to turn on anti aliasing, all other games I switch it off. But then we get to the absolute bottom of bad design. Main culprit is the save system. The save stations seem a very cool idea for the first 5 minutes of real gameplay - they fit in the narrative, style and so on... But one hour in I get frustrated to no end by their "design". You can only save at a station, and once you do it is on a cooldown (...). And if you get jumped by the alien, alert the humans, or get grabbed by an android - have fun replaying everything up to that point (and collecting the lone blueprint that was placed right before the next save station), everytime something bad happens. And bad (scripted) stuff happens a lot. So - in essence a checkpoint system with cooldowns and manual activation. Normal manual saving would have saved the fun even despite the next design flaw: the main "antagonist". I watched the Alien movie in the mid eighties when I was little, which was the biggest mistake at that time in my life. It was late at night and somewhere in autumn, on a large black and white TV. I was scared shitless afterwards and had trouble sleeping for months. Here, not so much. The Alien is just an invulnerable plot device which is not scary after the second time you encounter it and all the contrived ways the developers chose to annoy and block you with it. The way the revolver functions is absurd. The same with their quick select wheel. You are not supposed to fight androids in melee... All dlcs are sad (for me), blatant milking of the cult, with no feeling. I made myself finish the game on steam a long time ago, gave it another go here and must admit have lost the will to play after about 40% into the story and immediately uninstalled it, with no regrets.

Game crashes at a simple load screen 7/8 of the way through the (looooong, boring, repetitive) game where you do 3 things over, and over, for 10+ hours. Unfixable. Many hours wasted on a game that can't even be finished. They say "blame NVIDIA" in the forums, but since my video drivers are no longer updated, I'm SOL. Old computers/NVIDIA users be warned: you need the latest, greatest video driver (early-2022 drivers are too old) to complete this game from 2014, or else they'll blame their programming faults on your video driver. My video card is several years newer than the game. Everyone else be warned, you just might spend 10hrs invested in a game that ends in a solid black screen with a infinite spinning circle in the corner, and the solution is, "just buy a new computer, to play our oldass game" Yet another reminder that publishers only put their defective games on GOG, where there's no need for DRM because nobody would copy it anyways.

QTEs, railroading, knee high invisible walls, scripted jump scares, nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia, bad kb mapping, crafting and minigames, this game has it all. Avoiding the alien a couple of times is ok. Getting killed 20 times in a a row and it's tedious. A game that isn't fun anymore is now *work*. The entire survival horror genre only is fun on the first try, then it just sucks. Upsides, it's pretty and the sound effects are good and it's dirt cheap on sale. Hey, 10 bucks is 10 bucks. Play until you're frustrated, then use the mod to turn off the alien AI and finish it.

Barely a game. Terrible story, bad graphics and about as frightening as Bugs Bunny. Repetitive and boring.