Aliens: Dark Descent: The Prometheus of RTS Games Review

Aliens: Dark Descent is touted as a real-time action game that carefully avoids real-time strategy classification. This new classification is not a gimmick. Tindalos Interactive has created an exciting single-player experience that flirts with several distinct genre traits, while clearly taking a unique and ambitious approach. Similar to the divisive Alien franchise film, though Prometheushis experiments struggle to maintain creative momentum throughout.

Dark Descent The resource gathering, technology upgrade, and base building aspects found in many RTS titles are completely removed or deliberately curtailed. There is no real-time macro layer to speak of, as the moment-to-moment focus is on the micro-actions as you maneuver your team of four USMC soldiers. It’s similar star ship Campaign missions where you go exploring with just a handful of Terran marines. This clarifies the tensions surrounding certain named characters and their survival: instead of ores and minerals, you’re after ammo and stress. And when one of your grunts is slaughtered — or worse, carried away by an alien drone to impregnate them — it breeds grief and regret. This is a brutal game with moments to remember.

You’ll be introduced to this framework with a 45-minute tutorial that doubles as a prologue to the larger story. This in-depth introduction is welcome as the systems have some peculiarities and you need to grapple with the unusual tactical options they offer.

Image: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Entertainment

The most sophisticated of these tactical systems focus on command points. You use this resource to set up suppressive cones of fire, fire off powerful short-range shotgun blasts, and spit walls of fire to protect your position. You can never pause the game, only revert to slow motion when you open the command menu. It is imperative that you quickly become familiar with this system as it is at the heart of tactical decision-making during high-intensity conflict.

But so is this tutorial Dark Descent in its most everyday form. The action sequences are boring and hardly offer any interesting tactical decisions or opportunities for creativity. It’s dangerous because it doesn’t try to hook a new player, doesn’t emphasize the game’s strengths, and doesn’t offer entertaining cinematic combat. This introduces a similarly memorized plot that begins with a Weyland-Yutani corporate conspiracy involving a disturbing synthetic human. There are moments later in the campaign that also slip into predictability, and it’s at these stages that the game threatens to lose your attention.

Much of the intrigue stems from the various subsystems that make up the structure of combat. The actual clicking and maneuvering is a bit tedious. Furthermore, you cannot send a single soldier or a smaller task force to defend a position or perform flanking maneuvers; The group is forced to stick together. This keeps the action streamlined, but also loses some of the tactical depth. Additionally, there can be some replay in the sequences as you repeatedly attempt to maintain long, narrow lines of sight to force oncoming hordes through chokepoints under your withering fire. However, he manages to keep things satisfyingly simple. The various environments are rich and fully realized in scale and vision. You can travel across sprawling colonies and vast space docks, with entire sections encased in a xenomorph shell. All of this is also greatly reinforced by the squad management and open world aspects of the game. It is in these times of timid, heavily armed exploration where Dark Descent

Image: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Entertainment

There are also moments of beauty and ingenuity. As you traverse vast sectors with inner and outer combat zones, you’ll be unexpectedly inundated with Xenomorphs of all shapes and sizes. The AI ​​adapts to your tactics, maneuvering around defensive vectors like sentry guns and walls of flame. You have to deal with facehuggers and acid blood and it feels like you are actually being hunted. Even the environment itself will occasionally turn against you, forcing your soldiers to face their mental trauma by locking themselves in rooms with blowtorches.

Between missions, you and your various soldiers research new equipment and unlock skills. Bring experience and resources back to your barracks. Clearly inspired by Firaxis’ XCOM games, this level creates a wonderful loop in which your soldiers’ potency is steadily increased to make them an even more attractive target for the Xenomorphs. It’s perceptive and memorable, and leads to some great storytelling moments.

Where Dark Descent Pushs Beyond XCOM is in mission select. The campaign is somewhat linear but gives an open-world feel by allowing you to discover new areas of the world map – various settlements and facilities on the planet Lethe, which is in the throes of a global crisis. While you are required to complete the main story objectives in each sector, you can return to each sector to gather missing items and complete sub-quests at a later time. Dark DescentThe structure of even allows you to evacuate mid-mission, preserving the mental and physical health of your squad members after everything goes wrong. I had extreme moments of ups and downs as I was evacuated multiple times while pursuing certain objectives, rescuing what I could and getting my squad to infirmary before redeploying them with new cadres. If you do this too often, the alien threat will increase over time. This creates the illusion of a permanent environment that develops on its own autonomy.

Image: Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Entertainment

Aliens: Dark Descent is sometimes ambitious, often for joy, but sometimes for indiscretion. While some might wish for a more intimate and frightening atmosphere Alien isolation Continuing this isometric tactical challenge is rich in consequences and rewards. This might not be the most coherent or the most extraordinary alien video game we’ve seen, but it’s certainly remarkable and imaginative.

Aliens: Dark Descent is available now for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was tested using a retail copy provided by Focus Home Interactive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, however Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. you can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.