Alien: Isolation

Thanks to a well-made opening that includes a nostalgic narrative and damaged VCR-style visuals, the first five minutes of Alien Isolation are far better than the woefully disappointing Alien: Colonial Marines released last year. But at the end of the 15 to 20 (!) Hours of play I spent in this horror and survival xenomorph show, I regret that I didn't stop after the first half-dozen. This doesn't mean Isolation is close to the wrong level of Colonial Marines, but its crime is just as huge: the concept of the game of hide and seek is a great idea that, in practice, not only spoils its introduction, but also grows. stretches over so long that it almost completely erases any sense of fun. A completely different form of horror than I expected.

Isolation impresses from the start not only because of the intro mentioned above, but because its artistic direction and sound design dutifully sticks to the vibe of the original Ridley Scott film in 1979. I can't stress this enough. . From “futuristic” DOS computers and their cathode ray tube screens to the screeching violin band-orchestra designed to raise fear, Isolation does its job resolutely well in terms of audio and visual. My favorite aspect of the presentation is the atmospheric use of fog. From fumaroles that escape air vents to clouds of white mist that obscure your vision as you rewire an area's essential systems to pursue your stealthy goals, Isolation really does have the sounds and looks. of something that clearly belongs to the Alien universe.

Considering the fact that this is a horror survival game, it took a little longer than I expected for the Alien to appear and cause some trouble. I forgot the fact that I didn't feel threatened for the first hour, however, as it's okay to give Alien Isolation time to lay its foundation and set its setting, tone, locations, and locations. characters. Amanda is likable, with a well-defined tough personality, worthy of that of her mother, the famous Ellen Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver.

Once the xenomorph really begins to stalk you through the dark and terrifying Sevastopol space station, Isolation takes another leap. It is an especially stressful game to play by design. About 99 percent of your predator's movements and actions aren't scrypted, so you never really know if they're going to leave you alone for several minutes at a stretch, crawl through the ceiling vents and then stumble upon them, or if he's going to sniff in the room you're hiding in for three minutes, forcing you to wait, hidden, for it to pass. The smallest noise or the smallest source of light will unleash the murderous madness of the creature which will charge at you and kill you. She's immune to your weapons - whether it's a pistol, shotgun, flamethrower, or crafted items such as Molotov cocktails and homemade bombs. In fact, only the last three weapons can hinder the Alien enough to force him to temporarily leave the area.

A slower, quieter, squat walk from a locker to a storage cupboard and then to a desk is often the safest method of progression, but as you will learn, the Alien's unpredictability is in order. both Isolation's greatest strength and its most crippling weakness.

The typical encounter in Isolation goes like this: You receive an alert pulse from your laboriously reconstructed motion tracker, and you hear the ominous sound of the Alien coming into the area from an air duct at the- above your head. You hide in a cabinet, storage cupboard, or under a desk, stare at your motion tracker until the creature completely leaves the area, then continue as quietly as possible towards your next objective.

And during the first hours of play, this formula works well and gives a satisfying tension effect. Yes, you're going to die - a lot, if you're like me - but on this honeymoon, Isolation effectively keeps the pressure on. Manually activated wall phones are the only way to save your progress. So reaching the next goal is truly experienced as a small victory in itself, and getting impaled by the Alien before you can land the backup handset is a dramatic defeat. The Alien's footsteps, the low, low noise it makes as it slips through the air vents above you, its angry screams and hissing, or having to bend down back and holding your breath as he sniffs as he searches for you while you hide in a locker, all inches away from his sour saliva - makes Isolation very good at ensuring that you are never out. feel comfortable trying to escape Sevastopol. Finally, the handful of timed hacking mini-games to perform while the creature can hide anywhere, also helps increase fear.

Unfortunately, the campaign mirrors Sevastopol itself: the longer it lasts, the more it crumbles. Ripley's nightmare has become mine: Isolation pushes its objective points so often to maintain the tension that it's almost comical. First, parts of the game are done without the alien, throwing you in the middle of aggressive androids instead of letting you fight organic terrors. Fortunately, these bots can be killed, through well-placed headshots and the help of guns which are not at all convenient to reload. Then, the fear disappears without the singularly lethal force (the alien) that stalks you. It's not a first-person shooter, though, although it does appear to be from time to time.

Worse, I firmly believed I had completed Isolation twice. And even more so the second time around when I completed Ripley's original quest: Get Info About His Missing Mother. It turned out, in fact, that I was still a long way from the end of the game. Indeed, I had a few hours left to play, but from there for no real reason. Your goal boils down to simply trying to escape the station for an easy eight hours, but with so much to do along the way - not to mention the incessant trips around the ship - that Isolation becomes repetitive and never never manages to change that.

Rather than offering you new gameplay, Isolation, like so many games before it, simply spends hours running (without creating fun) through a maze of corridors and throwing in your face lots of incongruous events, including brawls against human, android and alien enemies. Fright dissolved into frustration when I got killed from behind for the umpteenth time - even as I was crouched motionless and out of sight of the creature in an air duct. The pleasures of true survival horror gameplay discovered in the early hours of the campaign were then erased forever. Even when finally - finally! - you really come to the end, the conclusion is disappointing and does not adequately reward the 15-20 hours you just spent trying to survive.

And looking back, playing at the “hard” level - which I did because the menus say it is “the best way to enjoy the game” - was a very bad decision. In fact, playing hard means that Xenomorph can grab you anywhere, anytime, without giving you any chance to avoid death if he hears even a single pin drop to the ground. Sure, a flamethrower shot or a Molotov cocktail can keep him away for a little while, but the ammo to do so and thus repel the Alien is extremely rare. Don't play hard, don't make the same mistake I did.

Note, Isolation offers a survival mode based on the ranking, which challenges you to complete various scenarios with the highest score, which is obtained by obtaining the best times and reaching bonus objectives. It is recommended not to try it until you have completed the campaign, but after this endless marathon, I didn't even want to take a look (I did though, so I could tell you so sure it wasn't worth it.)

Ripley looking for Ripley. No, Alien: Isolation is not a self-discovery trip, but tells about Amanda Ripley's search for her missing mother. We remember: Ellen Ripley was the last survivor of the cargo ship Nostromo, whose crew was assassinated by a bloodthirsty Xenomorph until Ripley was finally able to blow it out of the airlock into space.

But instead of bobbing through space in hypersleep well-protected to domestic climes, the heroine disappeared with the Nostromo. 15 years after the incident, Amanda Ripley finally gets the chance to shed light on the matter: The flight recorder of the Nostromo was found and brought on board the Sevastopol space station. When Amanda arrives there, however, an unknown monster has pretty much decimated the crew.

The same crap has happened to another Ripley for the second time ... and there is no Colonial Marine with Pulse Rifle in sight, who could shoot the beast into a thousand pieces. Instead, our heroine plays hide and seek with the alien monster, which she relentlessly pursues through the widely branched ventilation shafts of the space station.

Fortunately, there are scattered objects everywhere that Ripley can use with a simple crafting system to make medicits, bombs, noise makers or other gadgets at any time. The monster cannot be killed with this, but it can at least be chased away or misled. Well, you just have to take what you get - and MacGyver would be proud of Amanda.

There's an alien standing in front of the closet ...

Alone in a devastated space station, no weapons, an overpowering enemy! No question, Alien: Isolation really wants to put us in fear and terror. And the game does that very well at first. If we sneak through the dark corridors of Sevastopol, something rumbles above us through the ventilation shafts, then suddenly somewhere in front of us there is a clatter, it can be nervous. Especially since we know that the alien can come out of any opening in the ceiling at any time in front of us or behind us.

Once we stand face to face with the drooling beast, that is tantamount to immediate game over. So we have to be careful. Better to sneak than walk, use cover. And always keep an eye on the surroundings so that we know exactly where to hide in case the monster suddenly pays us a visit.

Lockers are ideally suited as hiding places - as long as the alien doesn't see us disappearing into them. We peer out through the slits in the door and keep looking at the beeping motion tracker, the display of which visualizes the movements of the alien hunter as flashing dots.

Breathing is fatal

When the green glowing point comes very close to our closet hiding place, we hold our breath. In the truest sense of the word. If the alien stands in front of our locker, it is scented. Now we have to lean back, hold our breath at the touch of a button while playing and make as little noise as possible. That moment when the metal teeth, shiny with saliva, are only a thin sheet width away from us and the alien is sucking in the air - that is pure horror!

Not only does digital sweat run down the face of the play figure, but we also have one or two beads of sweat on our foreheads. What now? The alien disappears from our field of vision, which is restricted by the viewing slit. We watch it leave the room as a green point of light on the motion tracker display. Then we hear a rumble. Aha, so it has disappeared back into the ventilation shafts. We leave the locker, duck to the open door and sneak into the corridor.

The air seems pure. Then it rumbles again, and the beast comes down from the opening in the ceiling directly in front of us. We quickly disappear into the room with the locker, switch to the inventory, where we select the noise maker. We boldly toss the noisy grenade down the aisle, the alien dashing after it like a dog behind a ball. Our chance to disappear!

Trigger-happy fellow men

However, the alien is not the only opponent that we have to deal with in the course of the game: Crazy worker androids, the so-called Hiwis, and scattered survivors with nervous trigger fingers make life difficult for us. Direct confrontation is the wrong tactic, at least in the first two thirds of the game, as we are still missing a shotgun and flamethrower, which we won't find until later. And even with these powerful weapons, the game does not turn into a classic first-person shooter, because a majority of opponents is usually synonymous with screen death.

But there are almost always alternatives to open combat: We enter service tunnels through floor hatches, through which we can bypass the opponents. Alternatively, we lure them (for example by knocking on the wall) to a remote corner and sneak around them, but we play a dangerous game, because the direction and range of our adversaries' line of sight is not always obvious.

So we quickly have a bullet in our back and bless the time. Or we can use the noise maker to lure the alien, which makes short work of our human opponents in seconds. But with this we also put ourselves in danger, because the monster then searches the surrounding area for further victims.

Bulky monster

There are games that really kick your ass. Difficulty levels that seem to come straight from hell. Game overs non-stop, on the border between lust and frustration. Games like Dark Souls are good at that. Fans swear by the series because the level of difficulty is salted but never unfair. With Alien: Isolation, Sega follows the principle of a thousand screen deaths, and wants to push the player to his limits with an unpredictable and invincible opponent.

But it is precisely this unpredictability that makes the game incredibly demanding, but at the same time - especially in the first few hours of the game and due to the lack of tutorials - can lead to a lot of frustration. In Alien: Isolation you have to bite like a terrier. Contrary to the trend in modern games to be as accessible as possible, it's a pretty bulky monster.

There are no screen aids that explain how we should approach which situation. We're supposed to find out the rules of the game for ourselves. Namely, by first having to bite the grass again and again to understand how things are going. So we learn to survive on the Sevastopol amid lots of blood, sweat and tears. The longer we play the game, the more we become aware of at least some avoidable mistakes that we initially make.

For example, what do you do on the run from an invincible monster? Right: run! In the game, that's probably the wrong thing we can do. The alien reacts to sounds. During the test, for example, we walk through a spacious staircase several times because the beast keeps catching us in a room a minute away and there is no other storage point nearby.

"There is no danger here," we think to ourselves when we are once again at the beginning of the staircase, and we decide to run up the stairs that we have climbed a hundred times at normal slow pace in order to get the now routine internalized route behind us faster . We don't even notice the rumbling noises that had been accompanying us the whole time from the ventilation shafts above the ceiling paneling.

A mistake! The rumble is caused by the alien - and that in turn emerges suddenly from an opening in the ceiling, attracted by our sprint noise. We bite the grass and are allowed to return to the last save point. Yet again!

Retro future with a love of detail

It takes a bit of frustration resistance to hold out in this game to the end. No matter how well-versed you may be in dealing with the alien after a few hours, it always hits you. Impatient players and beginners quickly lose interest here. In addition, the last missions prove to be a real test of patience, as they unnecessarily drag out the game.

And that's a shame, because the game is damn close to the perfect alien implementation. In view of the attention to detail that has gone into the retrofuturistic design, we even like to forget the question of the alien's motivation to stick to our cheeks of all people, even though there are many more (loud) people on the space station.

In the end, alien remains: Isolation is a (if you accept the unyielding level of difficulty) a well-playable horror adventure, but if you want to venture onto the Sevastopol space station, you should bring three things with you: an affinity for the alien films, great resistance to frustration and a good gamepad. Controlling the mouse and keyboard is a bit cumbersome in Alien: Isolation.

Why is it not possible, for example, to lean steplessly out of cover with the mouse while it works perfectly with the gamepad? The less intuitive operation of the terminals via the keyboard is also a cramp, since we don't have to navigate through the screens with the mouse pointer, but have to press keys.

Even if this is supposed to be an allusion to the low-tech future, in which there is no mouse, we cannot fully understand the cumbersome solution. The rest of the attention to detail, on the other hand, is very successful: corridors lined with pipelines, glossy white wall coverings, 8-bit computer terminals and lots of flashing lights - everything here looks like Ridley Scott's movie classics.

And sounds just as fantastic: the surround sound literally puts us right in the middle of the action. So it is a bit surprising that the fun at the attraction of this amusement park, the alien, is only granted to players who really want to bite through and have the necessary amount of patience. But they finally get a real alien game for it. And it really was about time.

Although the crazy fashion for survival horror has faded slightly in recent months, fans of the genre for the next several weeks will certainly not complain. The Evil Within is coming soon, and the beginning of the next year is also a period with some interesting premieres. The new terrifying season of "fear of the monitor" opens, however, a completely different production. Alien: Isolation , because this is what we are talking about, aroused quite a sensation from the moment of its announcement - not only was it really scary, but also its plot was to allude to a story that, despite the passage of time, still fascinates millions of Alien fans today. The expectations were high, everything looked great on paper, but as the game itself showed, not necessarily in practice.

The plot of Alien: Isolation focuses on Amanda Ripley - the daughter of the famous Ellen, the main character of the film saga. A girl haunted by the nightmares of the past and the desire to find out what really happened to her mother, decides to take a job at Weyland-Yutani - the same corporation that owned the famous freighter Nostromo. Almost 15 years after the disappearance of the spacecraft, all crew members were declared missing, but our protagonist cannot come to terms with the disappearance of her mother and tries to find out more on her own.

Help in this prolonged search comes from an unexpected side. Everything indicates that the crew of the independent ship Anesidora has just acquired a black box from Nostromo . Getting to know the truth about the whole incident seems closer than ever. Amanda is informed by one of the employees that the corporation wants to obtain the missing records and is now assembling a team that will set out to recover them. The task is to be so much simpler that the aforementioned ship with the captured box decided to stay in one of the larger space ports in the area - Sevastopol. Our heroine doesn't think too long and soon finds herself on board with the rest of the team. As you can imagine, what was supposed to be a standard mission, quickly turns into a fight for survival that Amanda has to fight in the title isolation. Moving slowly forward, it not only gets closer to deciphering what happened to Nostromo, but also uncovers a much more terrifying truth about what happened at the station.

The story itself may not sound spectacular and revealing, but it must be admitted that the following chapters fit perfectly into a certain canon of films about the Alien. Those who are a bit better acquainted with the entire saga will notice references to the first cinematic scenes at every step - not only in individual parts of the script, but above all in the atmosphere that accompanies exploring individual locations. In this case, Creative Assembly fully kept its word. Walking through the successive modules of the station, we are surrounded by a futuristic retro atmosphere from each side, characteristic in particular of the original from 1979. The creators took care of a very precise reproduction of furniture, clothes, cockpits, computers and other devices, as well as the rest of the items. Thanks to this, you can feel a very specific film atmosphere from the very first minutes, which is probably the game's greatest advantage . Locations outside the deck of the ship are equally favorable - almost every one looks like it was taken out of a silver screen.

However, we do not have much time to enjoy the nostalgic views. Soon all hell breaks loose at the station, and the Stranger naturally plays the leading role in all this chaos. Although he is not the only one who reacts with furious aggression when he sees us, he is the greatest (and permanent) threat of all enemies ... but only in theory. If someone hoped that for a dozen or so hours he would be forced to run away from the Xenomorph hunting us, then Alien: Isolation would be very disappointed. We stay alone with the beast for at most 1/4 of the game, and we spend the rest of the time spinning in circles, adjusting valves and avoiding survivors and androids . It is true that the Alien appears from time to time somewhere in the background, but he marks his presence at most with a short walk in the area, and then disappears again in the ventilation system. It can be scary at times when it appears longer, but only for the first few hours of the game, when we're still vulnerable. The moment we draw a flamethrower or Molotov cocktails, all the spell breaks and our dangerous Xenomorph turns from a hunter to the game . We still can't kill him, but a few flames are enough to make him run away in fear for a good few minutes. Its appearance then ceases to cause any anxiety in the player - it is simply too easy to chase him away.

Paradoxically, the clashes with extremely durable androids and people staying in a group are a greater challenge. Avoiding individual patrols is sometimes a very demanding task, which probably gave me the most fun during the several hours spent with the game. The need to plan and approach each confrontation tactically is all the more interesting because we can use quite a large list of items and ... the Aliens themselves . It may not be morally correct to provoke the beast to attack a group that is blocking our further path, but the sight of the Xenomorph wreaking havoc and the enemies fleeing in panic is extremely satisfying. Especially if we take into account how much time it usually takes to prepare everything properly. The positive impression regarding this aspect is slightly disturbed by the crazy artificial intelligence of the opponents (getting stuck at an object, running in circles) and the defective physics of objects, but in the end you can turn a blind eye to it.

Fortunately, a bad word cannot be said about the audiovisual setting. Although minor graphic errors or levitating items do appear in Alien: Isolation from time to time, it does not have any impact on the aesthetic reception of the title. The detail of the location, which I mentioned earlier, is absolutely world-class, and even if the game does not stand out from the competition in terms of the quality of textures, the filters applied to the image make looking at the screen with the utmost pleasure . The soundtrack, openly inspired by the first Alien movies, also leaves no room for criticism, and the sounds that surround us, even despite the predictability of the game, can cause shivers down the spine.

I had a lot of problems with the final verdict in the case of Alien: Isolation . On the one hand, these are very atmospheric locations, some great sequences (not necessarily in Amanda's skin!) And a quite interesting mechanism of avoiding enemies, but on the other - high predictability, a lot of mistakes and a very disappointing main element, i.e. the Alien's behavior. For the first few hours, the game can scare and surprise you, but with each passing moment it becomes more and more secondary, and we are only left with beautiful film views and a feeling of weariness. Only at the very end, Alien returns to the right track, although even this is not able to completely cover the flaws that have to be constantly dealt with.

Alien: Isolation is incomparably better than Aliens: Colonial Marines , but at the same time it is quite average compared to the best representatives of its species. Due to the specific atmosphere and the atmosphere straight from 1979, fans of the universe will probably spend a few good moments with it, but outside players will not lose much if they do not become familiar with the new Alien. It could have been great, and it is "only" not bad - a pity.