Every good horror starts with someone investigating panicked screams all by themselves. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Aliens: Dark Descent is no different. The prologue begins with us venturing below deck to look into the commotion we saw on the failing security cameras, bringing nothing but a torch and some goodwill. We find facehuggers wrapping their tails around people’s necks, hatched eggs twisting the environment around them, and eventually, a lone xenomorph hunting for prey. They’re so terrifyingly strong that all we can do is hide, sneaking around to the exit—the game is teaching us to use the shadows an🌳d cover to our advantage. One xenomorph is that much of a threat. But five minutes later, it’s asking us to gun down a horde of them.
168澳洲幸运5开🐭奖网:Dark Descent never manages to strike a balance between its tactical mechanics and the ill-fitting survival horror. It’s a strategy game unashamedly inspired by XCOM 2 – to the point of feeling like a spin-off – and like XCOM, the focus is on squad-based action. The hub is a ship in orbit of an infested planet, and our missions task us with venturing to alien hotspots and clearing out eggs and xenomorphs while rescuing any survivors. That means we spend a lot of our time planting sentry turrets, lobbing grenades, and engaging in huge gunfights, none of which fits with the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alien: Isolation-like stealth we’re taught right at the begin🧜ning.
The horror-driv💛en mechanics feel half-baked and out of place. Detection lines can be cheesed as you move in and out of cover, which rips away tension as it becomes an awkward dance with an alien as smart as a housefly; crouching behind cover when an enemy looks your way is a comical display of four troops ducking at the same time, and the stress level feature, which was plastered over marketing as a ♉major selling point, amounts to little more than a difficulty modifier. If your marines get too scared and you fail to take care of them or avoid unnecessary encounters, they’ll be flooded with debuffs like “-1 maximum command point for every 2 Disobedient Marines”. Stress levels can also be reduced through consumable items, which cheapens the effect, turning it into more of a second health bar.
Dark Descent is at its strongest when you’re completing objectives and getting into gunfights. Certain tasks will have you defendi🌺ng a key point, like a download for information, so you have to hold the fort in awkwardly laid-out rooms as you wait. I would typically weld up as many doors as possible to bottleneck xenomorphs down a corridor laden with sentry turrets and suppressive fire, shotgun blasting any that came too close. The mix of individual marine abilities and engineering tools is an interesting way to transform each encounter into a puzzle, finding the best way to turn the environment to your advantage.
Aesthetically, the environments are perfect. The top-down impersonal camera rips away much of the horror, especially as facehuggers and eggs become red blips to shoot at, but each zone oozes NASA-punk with functional industrial settlements stretched across dusty and inhospitable planets. Everything is laid out in grids for that exact reason, which makes it intuitive to find your way through each zone, even if there are multiple levels. The map itself also becomes part of your toolkit, as you can use motion sensors to capture aliens on the move, which can make for some tense moments as you scramble to prepare for a gunfight out in the open. After a while, though, I realised how much easier it was to lob g🍎renades and run, since so many of the tools in your arsenal will easily overpower the xenomorphs.
It’s hard to find the fun in Dark Descent when it’s riddled with🌳 performance issues. It crashed four times within the first 20 minutes, and continued to crash throughout my entire playthrouಌgh, plunging my progress back each time as I relied on uncertain autosaves. Anytime even a few particles found themselves on screen, the entire game would stutter, and this was while playing on low graphics with an RTX 3070 card. Even the cutscenes are riddled with problems as they have poor lip-syncing and inaccurate subtitles, making an already generic and uninteresting narrative even more of a slog.
Outside of missions, you’ll spend most of your time in the hub, which is neღarly the exact same as XCOM’s, albeit with much less to do. The one key difference is the Psychiatric Care Unit. Your troops can develop ‘trauma’ during missions, so the solution is to pop them into a circular room with paintings of a forest on the wall. Trauma becomes a debuff tꦆhat you can iron out with the right choices, and long-term side effects can be squashed with rousing speeches of machoism.
Mental h🎃ealth should never be a minor footnote in a thinly-veiled difficulty modifier, treating it like an issue that can be tactically removed in mere days. Dark Descent does next to nothing to explore the themes of sending soldiers on repeated🍌 suicide missions, so its tackling of mental health comes across as exploitative and out of touch. It’s only there to serve a function, nothing more.
Dark Descent is a generic 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:XCOM clone with brief moments of engaging puzzle-piecing strategy. The horror is underused and feels wholly out of place as it pushes you further and further into action. Music is adrenal🃏ine-pumping and clearly designed to compliment firefights, troops yell ‘LET’S 🦩GO TEAM’ every time you move, and xenomorphs are easier to mow down than avoid. Nothing about Dark Descent wants you to be scared, but everything about Aliens does. Mix in the cocktail of performance issues and thin mechanics, and what you have is another disappointing entry in the catalogue of Alien games.
Aliens: Dark Descent puts you in charge of a team of colonial marines🧸, who must face off against b💯oth Xenomorphs and the Weyland-Yutani Corp. An RTS from Tindalos Interactive and Focus Entertainment, it launched in June 2023.
