An unsettling silence filled the station. The interiors of the buildings were in disarray – the rooms were streaked with blood and the furniture was overturned. Guttural sounds echoed from the ebony nests; The pounding footsteps grew louder the longer my marines stood still. While Aliens: Dark Descent isn’t a survival horror title, it does a great job of capturing the menacing atmosphere of the franchise. It comes as a solid squad management XCOM Lite with a new fearsome style. While it respects the source material and nails its inspirations fairly well, the squad coordination and combat can be a bit unruly and frustratingly unfair at times.
Crash-landing on the moon known as Lethe, a Xenomorph escape takes on the roles of former Wayland-Yutani Administrator Maeko Hayes and US Colonial Naval Officer Jonas Harper. The narrative is snappy, in the alien-hell-things-go-to-hell kind of way, but adds a few gorgeous elements and humanizes the characters in a way that keeps you engaged and comfortable with the investment in the direction Dark Descent is taking pays off
You lead a squad as a single unit in mission zones colored with objectives and resources. The fog of war hid the enemies as I pushed troops through the doors while keeping my eye on a pulsing radar. During this time, memories of “Alien: Isolation” came to mind, and “Dark Descent” actually reproduces aspects of that hair-raising hookline. The tension and zone layout add a terrifying substance to exploration, and that tension explodes during battles.
Players shoot iconic creatures like Facehuggers and Alien Queens in real-time battles. A button press slows or pauses encounters to focus squad fire. The behaviors of the Xenomorphs are faithful to the series, wildly attacking my soldiers and dragging them away when possible. Deploying squad resources to fire a large-area shotgun or flamethrower provided depth and control to my marines’ auto-firing.
Unfortunately, stealth sections through packs of sleeping Xenomorphs make squad movement awkward. And sometimes crouching and clicking other buttons doesn’t go quickly, resulting in deadly encounters with enemies. Depending on your last acid death save, you may need to step back to prepare and try again to try again. Dark Descent is aware of its difficulty – as mentioned in the tutorials – but the difficulty spikes, backtracking, and awkward controls can be annoying to work around.
When you’re not in sweaty combat scenarios, the battles are fast-paced and get more and more playful as you level up your troops in more complex ways. Borrowing from XCOM, there are role-based classes that excel at gunfights or hacking with a flying bot. I couldn’t open certain doors without a ticker. Medics revive teammates from a comatose state, and Sergeants provide crucial stat boosts. Each class feels heavily involved during a particular mission.
At your home base, you can spend supplies to learn your class’s unique abilities, or hire medics to get injured soldiers back into the field faster. Under the hood of Dark Descent is the skeleton of an XCOM game. At first I thought this design was a safe crutch, but there’s a satisfying progression loop here that works in tandem with the construction of an alien story and becomes more entertaining the more you delve into it.
Steeped in dark sci-fi environments and human personalities, Dark Descent nails the hallmarks of an alien title and implements much of its squad-based gameplay. Despite some downsides and the troop control at certain moments, many of its elements captivated me to see the ending. It was an exhilarating ride of ups and downs, but I came away satisfied and appreciating the experimental twists.
