Aliens: Dark Descent - real-time squad-based tactical action

[Parsimonious cook]

Wait, sooooo... this is actually good? Damn.

 

[Tyranicon]

Wait, sooooo... this is actually good? Damn.

Sounds more like interesting and uneven, with finicky gameplay.

Which is basically best case scenario in 2023.

I personally might wait until it gets some bug (kek) fixes before buying though.

 

[kangaxx]

Might be a buy-on-sale job. Looks intriguing enough.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

 

[Fargus]

It's not shit at least from the looks of it, but a game you'd best buy on sale after some bugfixing done by devs. Full price bites. Not gonna bother pirating it either, have too much games anyway and not enough energy to play them all.

I'm not a die hard Alien fan, even though i like the setting, maybe if i was i'd be more inclined to try it.

 

[randir14]

I'm surprised how awful the graphics are. The character models in particular look a generation behind Alien Isolation, a game that came out almost 10 years ago.

 

[Zewp]

I'm surprised how awful the graphics are. The character models in particular look a generation behind Alien Isolation, a game that came out almost 10 years ago.

It's a AA game from a AA studio. Not the end of the world, especially for a top-down tactics game. The only time you see the models up-close is during cutscenes anyway.

What I find quite annoying is that they're not using the movie sound effects for the Xenos. Xenos sound like squealing pigs or something. Kinda weird. I wonder if there's some licensing issue with the sound effects from the movies. Most other Alien/s games use the correct sound effects.

Can't say too much about the gameplay yet, but it does look like it is better than a modern game has any right to be.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Anyone here has bought it yet? I'd like to hear impressions from a seasoned Codexer, not just the youtube reviewer plague.

 

[Fedora Master]

These are more personal gripes than real criticism but come on, it's very formulaic so far.
Company evil
Planet is dark and black
Lots of nogs everywhere

I guess that's what everyone thinks Aliens fans want but they could have shown a bit more creativity.

 

[ArchAngel]

Anyone here has bought it yet? I'd like to hear impressions from a seasoned Codexer, not just the youtube reviewer plague.

I am watching CohhCarnage playing it.. it seems interesting. It took many inspirations from nuXcoms but has a bunch of its own stuff like persistent moral system, soldiers losing limbs and stuff.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[ArchAngel]

 

[Parsimonious cook]

These are more personal gripes than real criticism but come on, it's very formulaic so far.
Company evil
Planet is dark and black
Lots of nogs everywhere

I guess that's what everyone thinks Aliens fans want but they could have shown a bit more creativity.

To elaborate:

- the chief engineering officer on board of the USCM ship is a black kweeeeeeen with dreadlocks that needs no man and takes no shit from anybody
- the chief medical officer on board of the USCM ship is a white (?) bull-dyke that needs no man and takes no shit from anybody
- the scientist dude on loan from WY presents himself as Dr. Mengele in space within the first few seconds and is very upset that the whole shit with aggressive alien life forms is keeping him from his human experiments

The protagonist through whose POV you watch the story unfold is a stronk AZN wahmin that needs no man either. Despite being a mid level deputy-manager at a shity WY space station in the middle of fucking nowhere, her first reaction to seeing the whole crew of a docking bay slaughtered by an unknown monster is "damn, something strange is happening overe there, I better go there and take a look."

So yeah, niggers and diversity galore and the storytelling has some reserves at the start. The gameplay appears p. solid though tbh fam. I will post more impressions later after I rack up a few more hours, but so far I am enjoying it.

 

[Fedora Master]

Good to see that in the future, mullets and tribal tattoos will make a comeback.

 

[Luka-boy]

 

[luj1]

this any good?

 

[Fedora Master]

this any good?

I've been playing on Hard and like it so far.

 

[Alienman]

I like it too, but it's too early to say anything conclusive. It seems to have a lot more sneaking than I initially thought. Which has some funny consequences - like making the marines the hunters instead of the aliens.

 

[Fedora Master]

I haven't encountered any bad bugs so far (heh), except the game got stuck when I tried to research some tech. Reloading fixed it though.
Fought the first Queen and it was fairly challenging. Thankfully with the permissive saving option the game autosaves before the fight so I did a few tries to get it just right.
You can really get into the shit if you happen to trigger a scripted encounter on top of a hunt, the first few tries my group managed to kill the Queen but got overwhelmed by a horde that came right afterwards.
The writing is a bit stereotypical, like your science guy immediately asks you "WHAT IF WE CATCH A LIVE ONE THOUGH??". Hopefully they won't do something that stupid.
Mandalore said he got into this habit of "one more objective" but personally I've not had the urge, never reached high alert on the bugs yet and that's probably for the best. Of course I don't know yet how badly the infestation level affects the missions.

What irks me a bit are the boss/special xeno mechanics. It feels a bit too much like the good old WoW "Don't stand in the fire!" thing where you have to dodge red circles or get fucked.
The tutorial is overly long. Not just the initial stuff on the space station, it keeps fucking going and locks you into certain choices like "You HAVE to research THIS particular tech NOW or you can't progress".

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Aliens: Dark Descent review​

A bug hunt that takes a more tactical approach to xenomorph blasting.​

By Rick Lane
published about 1 hour ago

(Image: © Focus Entertainment)

It was all going well investigating the refinery, until I descended into the basement. The maze of mineshafts and storage rooms is a perfect hideout for Aliens: Dark Descent's xenomorphs, and my squad of Colonial Marines has been harassed relentlessly by H.R. Giger's phallic nightmare since entering. Now they're trapped. Huddled at the end of a narrow corridor, three of my marines burn through ammo to suppress the aliens' advance, while the fourth works on hacking a control panel to open the door behind them. But there are too many xenomorphs, not enough time, and no way to avoid them in this cramped steel tube.
Then again, that means they can't avoid Sergeant Kurtz's shotgun.

(Image credit: Focus Entertainment)
With the xenomorphs inches away, Kurtz unleashes a barrel of buckshot at point blank range. It doesn't kill the hulking Praetorian leading the charge, but it does stun it, giving Tekker MacDonald just enough time to crack the door code. My squad scrambles through the aperture, and I instruct Corporal Sainz to fill the corridor behind them with cleansing fire. Still the xenomorphs rush on, shrieking as they burn. But a well-placed grenade from MacDonald's pulse rifle finally puts the bastards down.
It's a miracle my marines survived the encounter. But they won't survive the next one. They're exhausted, acid-burned, running low on equipment, and so frightened they can barely shoot straight. I'm minutes away from completing the mission, but I give the order to retreat anyway. Tomorrow I'll return with fresh troops and finish the job. The xenomorphs will be stronger, too, but that's a risk I'll have to take.
Many games have tried to replicate the slow burning tension and chaotic action of Aliens, but Dark Descent is the first game since Monolith's AvP 2 to really nail it. Developer Tindalos Interactive has thought intensely about how to get the best out of James Cameron's film in a virtual context, and their solution is a scintillating real-time tactics game that blends stealth, strategy, and nail-biting gunfights.

Less yapping, more shooting​

(Image credit: Focus Entertainment)
Dark Descent plays its weakest card first, so let's do likewise and get it out of the way. The game takes place on Lethe, a xenomorph-infested moon owned by the OG tech-startup Weyland Yutani, and where the Colonial Marine frigate U.S.S Otago has had the misfortune to crash-land. The cause of the crash is detailed in an elaborate, story-driven prologue that doubles as a tutorial. Tindalos Interactive has a decent cinematic eye, and Dark Descent captures the aesthetic and soundscape of both Scott and Cameron. But the script lacks the same wit and subtleties. A mess of forced conflicts and awkward dialogue, it's a draining parasite hidden in the game's chest, just waiting to burst out with a clanging line or an incongruous emotional outburst.
Once stranded on Lethe, however, the stories you create more than compensate for the narrative shortcomings. Each mission of the linear-ish campaign sees you dispatch a four-person team of marines to locations around Lethe, either to improve your situation or investigate why the moon is overrun with bugs. The first of these takes you to a facsimile of Hadley's Hope named Dead Hills, a sprawling shake 'n' bake colony with numerous buildings laid out on multiple floors. There's a bar, an armoury, a clinic, a command centre, and underneath it all, a twisting warren of mining tunnels.
Unlike most tactics games, you control the entire squad simultaneously, moving them around with the right-mouse button and interacting with environments using the left. It seems odd at first, but makes sense once you realise just how vulnerable your marines are when isolated. As you skulk around the mission, exploring buildings and highlighting interactable items with your shoulder-lamp, your motion-tracker in the bottom-right of the screen tracks any movement in a 60-metre radius. Whenever possible, you want to avoid the skittering white dots it highlights, not just because xenomorphs are an intensely bad hang, but because whenever you encounter them, it'll be worse than last time.

(Image credit: Focus Entertainment)
When a xenomorph spots you, the hive is stirred and they go into hunt mode, homing in on your location. Your squad will automatically shoot to keep the creatures at bay, but that alone is rarely enough to stop them. Hitting spacebar opens up a more elaborate skill menu. Suppressive fire will slow encroaching aliens in a wide cone, while grenades and shotgun blasts are useful for eliminating specific threats. But using these skills costs Command Points, and by default you only have a pool of three. They regenerate automatically, but the rate is slow.
Hence, Dark Descent's tactical fundamentals involve deploying these abilities effectively, knowing when to stick and when to twist. Yet no matter how well you fend off the xenomorphs, there will be lingering consequences to the fight. Every attack increases alien aggressiveness, represented by a creeping ticker in the top right of the screen. When this shifts up a gear, not only will more aliens prowl the mission area, they'll also send a massive horde in your direction.
But these attacks also increase your squad's stress levels, making them shoot more wildly and consume more ammo. They can reduce stress by popping Naproleve pills, or welding the doors of a room shut for a quick rest. But both consume vital resources.

Bug spray​

(Image credit: Focus Entertainment)
All this combines to create a thrilling rollercoaster of tension, where a single xeno wandering into a room can spiral into an intense, protracted battle that could leave your marines terrified, maimed, abducted, or plain old dead. And all of this is before you think about completing your objectives, which are often as multilayered and uncompromising as your battles with the xenomorphs. In Dead Hills, for example, you'll need to locate the command centre, and use it to locate a half-dozen missing colonists, escorting each one from wherever they're hiding to your ARC. It's vast, relentless, and exhausting, to the point where you probably won't finish it in one sitting. Indeed, a key element of Dark Descent is knowing when to pull the plug on a mission, and retreat to the Otago to lick your wounds and send back a fresh squad the next day.
When you return to the Otago, Dark Descent becomes more of an XCOM clone, using a basic facsimile of that game's strategy layer to manage your marines. Here you can treat their wounds (both physical and mental), promote them to unlock new skills, furnish them with better weapons unlocked with resources gathered during missions, and research new technologies using xenomorph samples. It's light compared to XCOM's strategy layer, and much more derivative than the way missions play out. But it serves an important purpose. Most crucially, each passing day increases the infestation level of Lethe, so every time you give your marines a break from a mission, you risk it becoming more dangerous when they return.

(Image credit: Focus Entertainment)
It's a fascinating mixture of ideas that creates tons of emergent conundrums. This occurs both at the small scale, such as choosing where to set up your defences when an alien onslaught is imminent, and the larger scale, like using a day to return to a previous mission to pick up additional resources and collect those broken sentry turrets you left behind. There are a few smaller problems, like marines occasionally getting stuck on world geometry, and the highly repetitive barks of your squad. But it's only in the storytelling where the quality noticeably dips.
Is Dark Descent to Aliens what Isolation is to Alien? In how it builds the best game it can out of the themes and ideas of the film it is based on, yes, absolutely. The execution isn't quite as successful, but it isn't far off, and even with those narrative shortfalls, it's still the most enjoyable and authentic Aliens game I've played.

The Verdict

84

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Aliens: Dark Descent
A powerful generator of gnawing tension and tough tactical decisions, Aliens: Dark Descent is a script pass away from being an all-timer.

Seems a lock-in for a winter sale and some patches.

 

[Zewp]

Mandalore said he got into this habit of "one more objective" but personally I've not had the urge, never reached high alert on the bugs yet and that's probably for the best. Of course I don't know yet how bad the infestation level affects the missions.

Infestation level makes a big difference later on. It looks like the alien threat (or "aggression") escalates much faster and there are also a lot more aliens passively roaming around the levels, making it difficult to get shit done without being spotted. I've given up a bit on stealth. I simply try to avoid detection for as long as possible and then eventually accept the near endless enemies the game throws at me.

It's a bit dumb that they don't allow you to carry ammo out of the level. I understand the need to maintain challenge, but there's a finite amount of ammo on each level and I just hit a point where I was carrying a lot of ammo because I thought I would finish the level with my squad, then I hit an infinite swarm event that really burned through my ammo, shit went to hell and I had to bug out after the event due to losing two marines. Now I get to look foward to entering the map when most of the ammo caches have been picked clean with no way to buy ammo for money at the base. It basically forces you to pick the skill that gives extra ammo when upgrading your marines.

 

[kangaxx]

I guess it also forces you not to pick the ammo dumps clean on your first few passes, which I quite like.

 

[Zewp]

Yeah, the intention is definitely for the player to consider whether they really need that ammo crate on this run. It just becomes a bit of a problem when you can't even roughly estimate how many drops a level will take. I've had levels where I went back for side quests, thinking I'll mop them up in one go and then it took multiple drops. I don't really know how to improve the system without making it trivially easy, to be honest. Later levels spawn infinite amounts of enemies during certain story segments and it's impossible not to burn through ammo, even when you have a lot of it. I guess you could switch your marines to sidearms, but that's pretty much suicide when you're being rushed by multiple xenos.

Interesting conundrum. Thankfully I haven't run out of ammo caches completely yet, but on the level I'm currently on (I suspect it's the last one) I can see that becoming a possibility if it drags on any longer. I think I have probably less than 6 ammo caches left on that level. Will be interesting to see how I overcome that if I only have the ammo I brought into the level with me.

 

[Fedora Master]

Can you reduce Infestation levels by killing Queens?

Having to restart the entire campaign because of a lack of ammo would be really fucking stupid.

The system they have would make for a great real-time Space Hulk game I think.

 

[Alienman]

I haven't encountered any bad bugs so far (heh), except the game got stuck when I tried to research some tech. Reloading fixed it though.
Fought the first Queen and it was fairly challenging. Thankfully with the permissive saving option the game autosaves before the fight so I did a few tries to get it just right.
You can really get into the shit if you happen to trigger a scripted encounter on top of a hunt, the first few tries my group managed to kill the Queen but got overwhelmed by a horde that came right afterwards.
The writing is a bit stereotypical, like your science guy immediately asks you "WHAT IF WE CATCH A LIVE ONE THOUGH??". Hopefully they won't do something that stupid.
Mandalore said he got into this habit of "one more objective" but personally I've not had the urge, never reached high alert on the bugs yet and that's probably for the best. Of course I don't know yet how badly the infestation level affects the missions.

What irks me a bit are the boss/special xeno mechanics. It feels a bit too much like the good old WoW "Don't stand in the fire!" thing where you have to dodge red circles or get fucked.
The tutorial is overly long. Not just the initial stuff on the space station, it keeps fucking going and locks you into certain choices like "You HAVE to research THIS particular tech NOW or you can't progress".

I play with the other save system, can't remember the name though. But with that one, the tension is ridiculously high. When I fought the queen you mentioned, 1 marine died outright, one got dragged away screaming, and one was knocked out into a coma. My lone survivor marine could have carried him, but the mission was to carry out some civvie, so he got left behind to die. Felt kinda rough, but hey, that's what the marines are for, right? Anyway, it was a great gaming moment right there. Reminds me of playing X-com for the first time when the mission went south and had to escape in the Skyranger with one traumatized survivor.