Alien: Isolation

I remember playing Alien: Isolation on Xbox back when it was first released. I was in awe, The game starts great. The atmosphere is top tier. Every little sound you hear makes you think, "oh crap, is it the alien?" Then I was left utterly disappointed when the dumb alien AI walked in circles around the area for 30 minutes while I watched from a locker. I got frustrated and bored, then turned it off sold the CD back to the store. I never bothered with Alien: Isolation again until recently - when I learned of one mod that fixed the entire game. "It's better with mods" means the game is bad, and players have to fix it. Why do people pay for bad games we have to fix? What a world we live in. The alien operates on two AI's - the local AI, which controls the alien's senses of hearing and sight, and the tether AI, which acts as a soft GPS locator, telling the alien where the player is at. If it moves too far away, it automatically gets rebounded towards the player. This is meant to assure the player will run into the alien during general gameplay, and not exclusively at scripted events. The problem with this design is it directly contradicts the first rule of horror: in order to successfully instill terror in your audience, you need to imply the object of fear, not engage it. The idea of the monster is always going to be more terrifying than the actual thing. When you over-expose the monster, it quickly becomes "oh, just another creature," and ceases to be terrifying. In this case, it became a chore to deal with the alien. If you want to play this game "the right way," use a mod that cuts the tether on the alien, or at least extends its leash a great deal. It becomes entirely possible you will never encounter the alien at all beyond scripted events. And you know what? That's actually a good thing. You'll make better progress in an otherwise absurdly long game, and it becomes far more terrifying.

Its better than all the movies that came out after Aliens.

Survival horror? More like anxiety simulator, stealth is you best tool and even then the xeno is never far away, every interaction is designed to slow you down: checking terminals, hacking doors, using the torch, entering passwords, and even looting containers. Good luck survivoing your trembling hands while an unstopable death machine is breathing on your neck, weapons are scarce and ultimately useless, even if you shoot human enemies the gunfire will just attract unwanted attention and then everybody dies. As a fan of the Penumbra/AmnesiaI series I love this game, get ready to die a lot and feel like the luckiest woman in the universe when you get away with your life. Sound design is great, music is minimal, but adds to the suspense and graphics are a treat with the station designed just like the old movies to feed your retro nostalgia, unfortunately there's some issue with the antialiasing , can't make it work properly and there are a lot of jagged edges even at 1440p, but I can live with that.

Is it perfect? No. But the creator absolutely poured their hearts into this game. Gameplay is solid. It's only sin is that it can be tedious with the button combinations just to unlock a door. Besides that, the level of detail and love for the first Alien movie is absolutely amazing. They even got Blade Runner easter eggs. When IGN and friends give a game like this and Terminator Resistance lower scores than Fallout 76 or the latest woke corporate puke that the game industry loves to shove down our throats, you know that game journalism is dead. Civvie 11 had a perfect quote about game journalism's treatment of developers that actually making games they care about, especially with licenses, and I'll close with it. "When developers actually seem to care about what they're doing with a licensed property, maybe encourage them a bit" - Civvie11

visually immersive with character focused story telling makes games and movies work out best superior game optimization and game controls 5 STARS