Aliens: Dark Descent | REVIEW

What would you get if you took the new XCOM games and exchanged their old school aliens with the slimy Xenomorphs, while at the same time moving their setting from Earth to the deep space — and evolving their strategy from a turn based to a real time one?

Yep, you guessed it — you would get something like Aliens: Dark Descent, the newest game set in the Alien universe, in which you will manage a squad of Colonial Marines from isometric perspective, taking them on various missions, between which you will have to heal them and equip them with freshly researched weapons and gadgets.

And before you ask yourself if that makes sense, since the best interactive Alien experiences are associated with the first person perspective (think Alien: Isolation or Aliens Versus Predator 2), rest easy — Dark Descent manages to retain all the important bits of the source material, from its dark and tense atmosphere, to the sights and sounds deeply ingrained in fans’ memory. You know which I mean — ominous music playing over images of tiny space stations being dwarfed by the gargantuan planets behind them… which are themselves lost in some remote corner of the universe, where no one will hear their citizens scream when Weyland-Yutani unleashes some new terror it hoped to exploit in their never-ending pursuit of corporate profits.

In other words, despite its isometric perspective, the game manages to be scary and tense. And it manages to do that even in its later stages, when your well-equipped squad of marines will keep meeting more and more dangerous Xenomorphs, while constantly ending up on missions in long, dark corridors, abandoned mines and factories where electricity outages are a regular occurrence.

In addition to its perspective and the way its campaign is structured, with tactical missions sandwiched between strategic base management segments, Dark Descent will also remind you of XCOM with its difficulty. Aliens are quick, dangerous and can attack you from almost anywhere. And even if your marines manage to shoot them before they start breathing down their necks, there is a chance they will be hurt by the Aliens’ acid blood. Of course, there’s also the good ol’ motion tracker, which will show nearby movements on your mini map, at the same time keeping the tensions high with its constant beeping, stressing you out — as well as your marines.

See, stress is a thing you will have to deal with in Dark Descent, in addition to various traumas and character traits. Getting hurt — or just surrounded — by Aliens will impact your marines’ psyche and precision, while constant high levels of stress will help them develop traumas that will impact their performance in future missions. That is, if you don’t send them to the psych ward after they return to the base. On top of that, different marines will have different character traits: some will, for example, be kleptomaniacs, stealing a percentage of the resources you collect during missions, while others will be stubborn, choosing their own skills during leveling, totally randomly, which was quite a surprise when I first saw it happen.

Leveling itself works just like you would expect — your marines gain experience during missions, and with each new level, you get to choose some new active and passive bonuses for them. Additionally, every few levels you will get to choose a new class-specific bonus, which can vary from drones that handle certain interactions instead of your marines (like welding doors), to radios that give them more command points used for special skills and weapons (like shotguns and flamethrowers, which are restricted by their own cooldowns).

All those elements make the game quite challenging, and you could often get stuck in a loop of constant saving and loading, trying to avoid some catastrophic mistake, since it’s quite easy to find yourself in a situation where your marines die, get strangled by a Facehugger, or where they are simply left with no ammo for their chosen weapon.

And even though I’m probably one of the rare ones who found the initial Dark Descent trailers intriguing, I have to admit that the final result exceeded my expectations, with a well realised atmosphere and plenty of interconnected systems that enhance it and keep the tensions high.

Aliens: Dark Descent | developer: Tindalos Interactive | publisher: Focus Entertainment | platforms: PlayStation 5 (played), PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC