Alien: Isolation

I played on Steam and finished it, 30h of gameplay. I can't understand why the game have so much positive review. The atmosphere is well done, but that it. Everything else is dull. You'll crouch, crawl and sneak from the start of the game until the end. The story is uninterested an expected in the Alien universe. Since the start, you'll follow a straight line until the end of the game, no exploration. The game is slow, you'll always sneak, the game is about stealth, there is no action, no planning, no strategy or tactics, or puzzles. You slowly move between locker to locker and under desk, waiting the Alien to return to the vents. The Alien since you first encountered it will follow you, doesn't care if you move between the station using a train or elevator, he will be there always on top of you in the vents. Another annoying thing is the ambient sound, at first it is great it helps with the atmosphere, then you'll realize it is just annoying, there is so much sounds at the same time in some scenarios, even sometimes when the Alien is not there, and you double-check with the sonar device there is a sound like the Alien crawling in the vents. (I don't know if this is a bug). The goal is power thing on. That is it. You'll move from a different location in the station, just powering things up, until the end. When you turn something on, suddenly something else lose power, or you need to turn on to advance in the game. You can't kill the Alien, the only weapon you use is the Flamethrower. If you use something else, it will make too much noise and the Alien will come down and will kill you. From time to time you shoot the pistol (To Android or some other humans) but is not need, you can sneak and pass the threat. The end of the game, is just dull.

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.