Another mission, another late gaming night, another sip from my coffee while the screen displayed my marines in an improvised shelter. “I’m ready to leave, I guess”, I told myself. Truth is, I wasn’t ready to leave the shelter. I wasn’t ready to keep playing Aliens Dark Descent. I was anxious, I was terrified. It’s been a long time since a game made me feel this way, and I wasn’t ready for it.
Like every good Alien movie or adaptation, it starts with a screw up — intended or not. Someone sent a container unit with Xenomorph specimens from the supply shuttle Bentonville to the mining moon of Lethes. It doesn’t take long until an outbreak happens both in the colony and in Pioneer Station. You start the game as deputy administrator Maeko Hayes aboard Pioneer Station in a quasi-tutorial and lore dump of what is happening. A couple of minutes later and you are onboard the now crash-landed USS Otago. Shot down by missiles after Hayes initiated the “Cerberus Protocol” in an attempt to stop the Bentonville from landing on Lethes. Desperation is the keyword in Aliens Dark Descent from the get-go. The Otago is in an awful shape; you are low on resources; half of its systems are damaged, and you need to investigate the nearest colony that isn’t responding to broadcasts — Dead Hills. Until this point, I expected Dark Descent to follow the same formula as many other tactical games I played in the last decade or so. “It will be a bumpy ride, but I’ll manage it”. Tindalos had other plans for me.
The unique way missions are handled is what sets Aliens Dark Descent apart from the crowded tactical gaming space. Instead of going on a “simple” mission and then coming back, you go on an incursion, so to speak. Dead Hills isn’t just some mining colony on your path to victory or demise, it’s a living place — I mean, except for all the dead people. If you placed a sentry turret on a room, it would stay there for the rest of the game. If you left materials behind, it will be there when you need it. Tindalos treats every location in Aliens Dark Descent as its own ecosystem, filled with primary and secondary objectives, data pads, traps and surprises. It asks you to remember its corridors, to memorize chokepoints, to strategize the best approach so you can minimize the chance of casualties, to “set up” a half-baked forward base of operations — at least that’s what I called my hastily put up shelter with two sentry guns and dozens of motion detectors — so you can get to the bottom of what caused the outbreak and if you can stop it.
While this is not unheard of — Ironward’s Red Solstice 1 and 2 being great examples of persistent locations — Dark Descent uses the Alien IP to reach new heights. The threat of Xenomorphs is ever so present. The more time you spend on a location, the harder it gets. To make matters worse, the xenomorphs are very good at detecting sounds, therefore even the tiniest explosion needs to be considered if it is worth it or not. Once they find you, get ready for a fight because the hive will either send a pack of aliens towards you or start a hunt. Kill too many of them and you end up in a worse situation, with an “Massive Onslaught” — the games terminology for “A massive horde of xenomorphs is coming your way, good luck.”
And then we have the stars of the show, the colonial marines and the ARC – a mobile transport vehicle that can double act as cover fire and it’s pivotal to the deployment of each squad at a specific area of the map. Sadly, the bunch that survived in the Otago isn’t the cream of the crop. Some are unfit, some are undisciplined, others have poor sight. Very few don’t have a negative trait; while this goes against the “canon” of the Alien universe, it makes total sense in terms of game design. Dark Descent is a game where you take pride in deploying a marine with 30% of accuracy. When they level up and can sometimes be up to 60% or even more accuracy via upgrades or special talents, losing them in the field is one misstep away. The more time they stay out in the field, the more stressed out they get. Stress affects accuracy, movement and some traits will even slower your command points gain (more on that soon). If you get spotted by a xenomorph and your team becomes hunted, stress levels increase at an alarming rate. The only way to reduce it is by creating a shelter, welding one or more doors and resting, or going back to the Otago. Oh, and you need tools for that. Tools use materials — the same resource that is used to unlock new weapons.
With so many layers to take into consideration, no wonder Tindalos Interactive opted for a more “simplified” approach to movement and special actions. You don’t control each marine individually but move the squad as one. This makes it easier to navigate and also to use actions such as suppressive fire, flares to increase accuracy, deploy sentry turrets or burn everything in an arc using a flamethrower. Each of those actions costs a command point, which regenerates after a few seconds. Unless, of course, you are being hunted or are in the middle of a firefight. While the game uses a “tactical pause” system in order for you to deploy special actions, it’s the “unpausing” that’s hard to do, at least for me.
Whenever I travelled to Dead Hills, Berkley’s Docks, Jackson’s Landing and other locations, it felt like I had a rope around my neck. “The clock is ticking Lucas, don’t spend too much time, keep moving, keep looking for supplies, looking for answers, looking for civilians”. At no point, I felt that I was on solid footing. The beep of the motion tracker made me anxious. Watching a bar slowly fill while a marine checks a corpse or downloads information from a data pad was excruciating. I took dozens, maybe hundreds, of minor breaks to unclench my jaw and rest my shoulders. A poorly lit corridor made me hold my breath even though I knew there wasn’t any threat.
By comparison, even the most intense Artefact Sites and Colony Assault from 1995’s X-COM: Terror from the deep are like playing with little toys in the backyard of your house. At least there I knew the threat, I knew what was coming, that was going to be an end for it. That I could take my time and eliminate one alien after the other. No such thing in Dark Descent. During one of the many incursions I went through during the 30h+ or so campaign of Dark Descent, one stood out to me. I sent my best team with the best tools and equipment to complete a primary objective, not even a single marine was below level 8 (the cap being 10). I knew it was going to be rough. Even the game warned and asked me if I was ready. I thought I was. Only one marine survived and that was because of prior planning and luck — a lot of luck. I simply told him to run to the ARC and hoped for the best. Not only I had left a lot of supplies behind but also a lot of marines behind. I knew that another team would have to pick up the slack and get those materials. A bunch of rookies, ready to be thrown into the meat grinder.
I have some quarrels with how Tindalos handled some of the game mechanics. The “move as one” squad doesn’t always work as intended, with places that could act as a cover being wildly inconsistent and sometimes unintuitive. I lost count of the times I wasted command points just to see a marine throw a flare and not get the accuracy buff because my team wasn’t in the proper radius. There were also some game breaking bugs that thankfully are fixed by the time this article was done. The story itself isn’t as interesting as I hoped it would be by the end of it and some of the voice acting falls flat. The second part of the game having an odd pacing and feeling rushed sometimes; considering the same can be said about Battlefleet Gothic Armada 1 and 2, Tindalos previous games, I really hope that the team takes some time to reflect and improve those areas.
These are slight issues in the grand scheme of things. Aliens: Dark Descent managed to do something that no tactical game even came close to it: fill me with dread and fear. Not fear of losing progress or losing a marine, the actual fear of opening a door, of what lies beyond it, of what lurks in the shadows. It achieves heights that until now I considered that only Alien Isolation could, to turn even the most mundane activity into the most excruciating, anxiety-inducing and nerve wrecking thing anyone will ever do. You ask me if I’m ready to leave the shelter 5 years from now and my reply will be the same: “No, I am not ready”. I don’t think I ever will.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
