![]() ![]() This tendency towards streamlining also rears its ugly little mouth-on-a-stick in both the campaign and mission structure. Image credit: Focus Entertainment Image credit: Focus Entertainment Want to have three of your marines stay behind cover ready to fire, and one of your marines edge towards an automatic door just close enough for it to open and give you a clear shot at whatever’s lurking behind it? Whoa, slow down there, Sun Tzu! Any more hysterics out of you and we might have to grab the icepick and hammer! You’ll move as a squad, and you’ll like it. Need to open a crate or weld a door shut, and it’ll pick the closest unoccupied marine. Need to heal a marine, and it’ll pick your medic, if you have one. Instead of controlling each member of your squad of four marines individually, you control them all as a single unit, with the game using its “state of the art thinking-is-for-nerds priority system” or whatever the trailers called it, to decide which marine is best equipped at any given moment to do the specific task you want doing. It’s the apparent disdain for “micromanagement” that’s done it. ![]() But when you further console-ise an already console-ised tactics game, you’re deliberately limiting the sort of stories it can tell and choices it can offer, seemingly in service of the sort of immediacy and momentum that works well for the first few hours, but soon reveals itself to be as suffocatingly restrictive as an especially affectionate face hugger on a half gram of Molly. I have a tablet holder attached to my bed frame so I can play Switch lying down. What if there was a way to do XCOM but without all the knobbly bits?īy XCOM, I mean 2012’s XCOM, a game I love dearly, but one that has already been deliberately and surgically scoured of said knobbles. It’s a game that’s (rightly) decided that a very particular type of strategy game is the best format to convey Aliens’ whole schtick, but then seems to have realised, hang on, we’re at risk of (alien) isolating and possibly even (alien)ating a lot of potential customers here. You order your entire squad around at the same time, pausing or slowing time to issue commands like grenades or suppressive fire, using a stock of command points that refill over time. Just four.ĭark Descent is not a game for strategy game fans nearly as much as it’s one for Aliens fans. I just wish it trusted me to be able to count higher than one. It really does do the license justice, so if that’s what you’re looking for, dig in. It’s the first to really capture the white-knuckle vibe of setting up perimeters, quipping out that last line of top-tier banter you’ve been saving, and seeing the shapes on the motion tracker creep closer and squeal louder. In the same way that Alien: Isolation is, for many, now the definitive Ridley Scott’s Alien game, I’ve got no problem getting all ‘game critic who wants to feel important by making wild declarative statements’ and saying that Aliens: Dark Descent is now, for me at least, the definitive James Cameron’s Aliens game. Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-8600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070, Windows 10.This creates an illusion of a persistent environment, one that's evolving of its own autonomy.Aliens: Dark Descent is an authentically atmospheric campaign borrowing from both turn-based tactics and survival horror, stymied by a seemingly deep paranoia you might mistake it for one of those strategy games for nerds. Do this too often, and the alien threat will intensify over time. ![]() ![]() I've had extreme moments of highs and lows, as I've evacuated multiple times when pursuing certain objectives, salvaging what I could and placing my squad in the med-bay before re-deploying with new roster members. Dark Descent's structure even allows you to evacuate mid-mission, preserving the mental and physical health of your squad members after it all goes sideways. While it's required that you complete the main story objectives in each sector, you can also return to each one to scrounge up missing items and complete sub-tasks at a later time. The campaign is somewhat linear, but it achieves an open-world feel by allowing you to uncover new areas of the world map - various settlements and installations on the planet Lethe, which is undergoing a global crisis. Where Dark Descent pushes beyond XCOM is in mission selection. ![]()
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