Aliens: Dark Descent review: The Prometheus of RTS games

Aliens: Darkish Descent is billed as a real-time motion sport, fastidiously skirting the real-time technique classification. This new classification just isn’t a gimmick. Tindalos Interactive has produced a tense single-player expertise that flirts with a number of disparate style traits, whereas clearly offering a singular and bold method. Nonetheless, very like the divisive Alien franchise movie Prometheus, its experimentation struggles to keep up inventive momentum all through.

Darkish Descent solely strips or purposefully narrows the features of useful resource gathering, technological enchancment, and base constructing discovered in lots of RTS titles. There’s no real-time macro layer to talk of, with the moment-to-moment deal with the micro actions of maneuvering your crew of 4 USMC troopers. It’s akin to StarCraft marketing campaign missions the place you’re exploring with only a handful of Terran marines. This spotlights the stress round particular named characters and their survival: As a substitute of ore and minerals, you’re fearful about ammo and stress. And when one among your grunts is slaughtered — or worse, carried away by an Alien drone to be impregnated — it fosters grief and remorse. This can be a brutal sport of moments that follow you.

You’re eased into this framework with a 45-minute tutorial, which additionally capabilities as a prologue to the larger story. This extended intro is welcome, as there are some quirks to the techniques at play, and it’s good to come to grips with the weird tactical choices they current.

Picture: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Dwelling Leisure

Essentially the most subtle of these tactical techniques are targeted round command factors. You spend this useful resource to put down cones of suppressive hearth, ship highly effective short-range shotgun blasts, and spit partitions of fireplace to guard your place. You’ll be able to by no means pause the sport, solely resorting to sluggish movement whenever you open the command menu. It’s crucial you attain consolation with this technique shortly, because it’s the guts of tactical resolution making throughout the high-intensity battle.

However this tutorial can also be Darkish Descent at its most mundane. The motion sequences are uninteresting, providing few attention-grabbing tactical selections or alternatives for creativity. It flirts with hazard in not making an attempt to hook a brand new participant, failing to focus on the sport’s strengths or entertaining cinematic fight. This prefaces a equally rote storyline, which begins with a Weyland-Yutani company plot full with a disturbing artificial human. There are moments later within the marketing campaign which equally slip into predictability, and it’s in these phases the place the sport threatens to loosen its grip in your consideration.

A lot of the intrigue arises from the varied subsystems that compose the feel of the fight. The precise clicking round and maneuvering is considerably uninspiring. What’s extra, you possibly can’t ship a solitary trooper or smaller fireteam to defend a place or carry out a flanking maneuver; the squad is pressured to stay collectively. This retains the motion streamlined, however it additionally saps among the tactical depth. Moreover, this may make for some repetition in sequences, as you repeatedly attempt to preserve lengthy slender sightlines to drive approaching hordes by way of bottlenecks below your withering hearth. It does handle to maintain issues satisfyingly easy, although. The totally different environments are wealthy and totally realized in scope and imaginative and prescient. You get to journey by way of sprawling colonies and big area docks with whole sections encased in a xenomorph shell. All of that is additionally enhanced strongly by the roster administration and open-world features of play. It’s in these intervals of tentative, closely armed exploration the place Darkish Descent actually takes off.

Picture: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Dwelling Leisure

There are additionally moments of magnificence and inventiveness. When you are traversing huge sectors with each inside and exterior fight zones, you’re unexpectedly swarmed by xenomorphs of all sizes and styles. The AI adapts to your techniques, maneuvering round defensive vectors similar to sentry weapons and partitions of flame. You must cope with facehuggers and acid blood, and it feels as if you’re really being hunted. Even the surroundings itself will sometimes flip in opposition to you, forcing your troopers to confront their psychological trauma by sealing themselves inside rooms with welding torches.

Between missions, you analysis new gear and unlock expertise together with your varied troopers. pouring expertise and assets again into your barracks. This layer, clearly impressed by Firaxis’ XCOM video games, creates a beautiful loop of steadily growing your troopers’ efficiency solely to make them an excellent juicier goal for the xenomorphs. It’s sharp and memorable, and it results in some nice emergent storytelling moments.

The place Darkish Descent pushes past XCOM is in mission choice.

The place Darkish Descent pushes past XCOM is in mission choice. The marketing campaign is considerably linear, however it achieves an open-world really feel by permitting you to uncover new areas of the world map — varied settlements and installations on the planet Lethe, which is present process a worldwide disaster. Whereas it’s required that you simply full the primary story targets in every sector, you can too return to every one to scrounge up lacking gadgets and full sub-tasks at a later time. Darkish Descent’s construction even lets you evacuate mid-mission, preserving the psychological and bodily well being of your squad members after all of it goes sideways. I’ve had excessive moments of highs and lows, as I’ve evacuated a number of occasions when pursuing sure targets, salvaging what I may and putting my squad within the med-bay earlier than re-deploying with new roster members. Do that too usually, and the alien menace will intensify over time. This creates an phantasm of a persistent surroundings, one which’s evolving of its personal autonomy.

Picture: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Dwelling Leisure

Aliens: Darkish Descent is at occasions formidable, usually to please, however sometimes to indiscretion. Whereas some could need a extra intimate and terrifying Alien Isolation sequel, this isometric tactical problem is wealthy in consequence and reward. This will not be probably the most coherent or distinctive Alien online game we’ve seen, however it’s definitely noteworthy and imaginative.

Aliens: Darkish Descent is accessible now for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Sequence X. The sport was reviewed utilizing a retail copy supplied by Focus Dwelling Interactive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media could earn commissions for merchandise bought by way of affiliate hyperlinks. You will discover further details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.