Even the environment itself will occasionally turn against you, forcing your soldiers to confront their mental trauma by sealing themselves inside rooms with welding torches.īetween missions, you research new gear and unlock skills with your various troopers. You have to contend with facehuggers and acid blood, and it feels as though you’re actually being hunted. The AI adapts to your tactics, maneuvering around defensive vectors such as sentry guns and walls of flame. While you are traversing massive sectors with both interior and exterior combat zones, you’re unexpectedly swarmed by xenomorphs of all shapes and sizes. There are also moments of beauty and inventiveness. It’s in these periods of tentative, heavily armed exploration where Dark Descent really takes off. All of this is also enhanced strongly by the roster administration and open-world aspects of play. You get to travel through sprawling colonies and massive space docks with entire sections encased in a xenomorph shell. The different environments are rich and fully realized in scope and vision. It does manage to keep things satisfyingly simple, though. Additionally, this can make for some repetition in sequences, as you repeatedly try to maintain long narrow sightlines to force approaching hordes through bottlenecks under your withering fire. This keeps the action streamlined, but it also saps some of the tactical depth. What’s more, you can’t send a solitary trooper or smaller fireteam to defend a position or perform a flanking maneuver the squad is forced to stick together. The actual clicking around and maneuvering is somewhat uninspiring. Much of the intrigue arises from the various subsystems that compose the texture of the combat. There are moments later in the campaign which similarly slip into predictability, and it’s in these stages where the game threatens to loosen its grip on your attention. This prefaces a similarly rote storyline, which begins with a Weyland-Yutani corporate plot complete with a disturbing synthetic human. It flirts with danger in not attempting to hook a new player, failing to highlight the game’s strengths or entertaining cinematic combat. The action sequences are dull, offering few interesting tactical decisions or opportunities for creativity. It’s imperative you attain comfort with this system quickly, as it’s the heart of tactical decision making during the high-intensity conflict.īut this tutorial is also Dark Descent at its most mundane. You can never pause the game, only resorting to slow motion when you open the command menu. You spend this resource to lay down cones of suppressive fire, deliver powerful short-range shotgun blasts, and spit walls of fire to protect your position. The most sophisticated of those tactical systems are focused around command points. Image: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Entertainment This prolonged intro is welcome, as there are some quirks to the systems at play, and you need to come to grips with the unusual tactical options they present. You’re eased into this framework with a 45-minute tutorial, which also functions as a prologue to the greater story. This is a brutal game of moments that stick with you. And when one of your grunts is slaughtered - or worse, carried away by an Alien drone to be impregnated - it fosters grief and regret. This spotlights the tension around specific named characters and their survival: Instead of ore and minerals, you’re worried about ammo and stress. It’s akin to StarCraft campaign missions where you’re exploring with just a handful of Terran marines. There’s no real-time macro layer to speak of, with the moment-to-moment focus on the micro actions of maneuvering your team of four USMC soldiers. However, much like the divisive Alien franchise film Prometheus, its experimentation struggles to maintain creative momentum throughout.ĭark Descent entirely strips or purposefully narrows the aspects of resource gathering, technological improvement, and base building found in many RTS titles. Tindalos Interactive has produced a tense single-player experience that flirts with several disparate genre traits, while clearly providing a singular and ambitious approach. This new classification is not a gimmick. Aliens: Dark Descent is billed as a real-time action game, carefully skirting the real-time strategy classification.
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