Review: Terrifying ‘Alien: Isolation’ Overstays Its Welcome
“We’ve gone this far — we must go on,” says Kane, the Nostromo crew member played by John Hurt, as he and his colleagues clamber toward a mysterious structure in the 1979 sci-fi horror classic, Alien.
About 12 hours into Alien: Isolation, the new survival-horror game from SEGA and The Creative Assembly, I could relate to Kane’s weariness. Alien: Isolation is a solid, occasionally brilliant entry in its genre, but it goes on a lot longer than it needs to.
Things start out promisingly, with an elegantly simple premise. You play Amanda Ripley, daughter of the original movie’s heroine. A young engineer with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, you jump at the opportunity to investigate the discovery of a flight recorder from the Nostromo, 15 years after it — and Mommy — mysteriously disappeared. Before long, your quest has you trapped on an enormous space station whose inhabitants are being picked off by something. OK, no point in being coy: It’s a 7-foot-tall insectoid predator with two mouths, a razor-sharp tail, and an unpleasant disposition. You know the guy.
Certain design decisions emanate so powerfully from this game that they amount to a kind of manifesto. Alien: Isolation strives mightily to get back to the roots of what made Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece so terrifying. Your enemy, through much of the game, is a single Alien. It’s a less-is-more gambit that works wonderfully. Nothing against James Cameron’s terrific 1986 sequel Aliens (which was openly and self-consciously more of an action film than a horror film), but being stalked by one Alien is somehow scarier than fighting off a dozen.
The production design lovingly re-creates details of the film’s look and feel, down to the squished, anamorphic lens flares and the irising air-duct doorways that make that creepy scraping sound when they open and close. Where necessary, the game tastefully extrapolates the film’s ’70s-futuristic aesthetic to a new setting. It’s a world of clunky computer consoles and bulky space suits, an alternate future in which humankind reached the stars without ever stopping to invent anything remotely resembling an iPad. Stylistically, it’s a triumph.
But what about the gameplay? If you’re expecting moments where you’re crouched inside a locker, peering through slats in terror as the Alien stalks to and fro, don’t worry — you’ll get them. You’ll also get tense air-duct crawls, frightening glimpses of fuzzy green blobs on a motion detector, and exceedingly creepy androids who seem blithely indifferent to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Klaxons blare, orange strobes pulse, and ominous shadows pool under coils of cables as you try to survive while not drawing too much attention.
This isn’t a guns-blazing shooter; you’re often woefully underequipped, the meek mouse to the Alien’s mutated tomcat. If you can play Alien: Isolation with lights low and headphones on and not feel your heart rate rocket, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.
In between the white-knuckle moments, though, Alien: Isolation has significant problems. The levels are too transparently set up to lead you by the nose from one place to another. Doors are often arbitrarily locked until the plot requires them to be open, and although Amanda can climb up ladders, leap across elevator shafts, and sprint down endless corridors, she’s absolutely stymied by a few suitcases piled up to bar her way. Hello, jump button?
More importantly, the interactions with the Alien often turn from tense to frustrating. The Alien’s movements can seem pretty random, and it’ll occasionally pop out of nowhere when you think you’re safe. That’s as it should be — up to a point. The Alien ought to be scarier and less predictable than a run-of-the-mill stealth-game security guard. But after watching its spiky tail pop through your belly three times in a row without warning, you’re no longer scared, just annoyed. The game starts to feel like a grim march to the next save point, the frequently stingy placement of which may have you grinding your teeth in anger more than quivering in terror.
The gameplay is overlaid with a lot of additional details: Emails and audio logs to fill in the story, a mini-crafting system that allows you to gather ingredients for your med-kits and weapons, and occasional computer terminals that let you vent air, turn off cameras, and the like. Though the extra story touches are welcome, the endless parts-scavenging sometimes feels incompatible with what should be a persistently tense, focused experience. And the hacking usually isn’t powerful enough to be worth the time it takes to do it. It feels like something that might have looked good on a design document but probably should have been cut.
Speaking of which, Alien: Isolation is about five hours longer than it needs to be. Well after a seemingly climactic sequence, I was still wandering corridors, dodging androids, playing silly hacking minigames, and unambiguously wishing the game were over. No game should overstay its welcome, and Alien: Isolation definitely does. As for the plot, it’s adequate but less inspired than the production design. Characters are largely interchangeable, and only a strong vocal performance by Andrea Deck as Amanda keeps the human element alive.
But when it’s good, the game is very, very good. As someone whose adolescent first viewing of Alien was practically a religious experience, I’m glad I didn’t miss Alien: Isolation. Its often pitch-perfect mixture of Gothic dread, cosmic awe, and sci-fi’s ultimate bogeyman makes it feel, at times, like coming home. How messed up is that?
What’s hot: First-rate sound and visuals; loving re-creation of the classic film’s style; it will make your pulse quicken
What’s not: Too long; clumsy level design; often more frustrating than scary
You can email Gordon Cameron here.
