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Alien Isolation PC Review
I just finished Alien Isolation for the PC and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to make a review on it, I rarely do reviews because most games don't excite me enough to care afterwards, but this game was just too fantastic to pass up.
After Aliens Colonal Marines I waited until the reviews showed up until I bought this game and since the common opinion was positive I felt like it was a safe buy, so I started playing it on Thursday.
Story
The story of Alien Isloation is pretty simple, set between the events of Alien and Aliens featuring Ellen Ripley's daughter Amanda's quest to find out more about her mother's disappearance.
Amanda travels to a space station known as the Sevastopol to find the flight recorder of the Nostromo that has been found by a scavenge team.
However Amanda soon finds out that an Alien is also on the Sevastopol and has caused chaos.
I won't go any further into the story since I don't want to reveal spoilers, but I thought the story was good.
Cutscenes are pre rendered with noticeably not so good lip sync, but that doesn't matter to me personally.
I felt that the ending however left a lot out and that could have been handled better.
Visuals & Performance
As everyone has probably noticed already, the visuals in Alien Isolation are beyond spectacular, the lighting is superb, the particles are just brilliant and it really creates an atmosphere that mimics the original film, the graphics and lighting are so well done that the game looks like real life most of the time and the flamethrower in particular looks photo realistic.
(Screenshots from my playthrough)
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
The character models are highly detailed, the weapons look fantastic, especially the flamethrower as I just said and our old friend the Alien looks stunning.
The way the lighting effects look on the Alien as he walks by look incredible.
As for performance I think the game runs very well, my PC is powered by an i5 CPU with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon R9 290 and I managed to get pretty good performance on max settings.
My frame rate varied however, at some parts in the game I would drop down to 20-30FPS while in most parts of the game I averaged 60-200FPS, I think it may have been my RAM and CPU bottle necking the GPU but even so the game runs smoothly and looks excellent.
The is is the kind of graphical level I will hold next gen games to.
Gameplay
Now comes the best part of the game, the survival horror gameplay is very good in Isolation, the controls are smooth, easy to use and full body awareness is always welcome in my First Person games.
The whole game you're going to be hiding, sneaking and using your crafted items to survive.
The human and android segments suck so bad sadly, I hate them, their AI is dumb and they just come off as frustrating, especially later on in the game where you come across these new kind of androids that can't be harmed or affected by any of your crafted items, the only thing you can really do is run from them, unless you have a certain weapon acquired later on the game.
The crafting system is pretty simple and easy to use, you simply find the parts needed that are scattered throughout the game. Items like pipe bombs, molotovs, flash bangs, EMP bombs etc can all be crafted and are pretty useful.
Also you can get certain weapons in the game like a 6 shooter pistol, flamethrower and others however all but the flamethrower are useless against the Alien.
The flamethrower can scare the Alien off for a short time, but the flamethrower uses up ammo REALLY fast and it sometimes doesn't work as much as even blasting the Alien with the flamethrower the Alien will sometimes still pounce through the flames and knock you over, taking health off you.
Now my favorite part, The Alien.
The Alien is the big threat of the game and is so not scripted, he never does the same thing twice, is always hunting you and is 100% unpredictable. There were some parts in the game where I thought he was programmed not to show up for story purposes but nope he can show up at any time and any place and especially when you least expect it, you are never safe from him.
He'll even show up in the android and human segments making them even harder.... or easier as he'll hunt the other humans too, but he'll ignore the androids.
His AI is excellent and something innovative, he always takes different paths and even sits and waits to ambush you sometimes, you have to be careful and watch for his signs otherwise he'll get you and he's always learning and adapting to your tactics too, I used a flare to keep him paused one time so could make an escape, but when I tried it again it didn't work and he got me.
Also just because you don't hear or see him doesn't mean he isn't there.
Alien shot 1
Alien says ello mate!!
The Alien can be a bit glitchy at times as I was in a vent one time and the Alien crawled in, looked right at me then clipped right throw me and continued up a ladder. But that didn't happen to me much.
Also I've seen people complain about the save system in the game, however I think the save system is perfect for this game, the save system works via these save points similar to the typewriters of Resident Evil, they are a pretty fair distance in between and if you die a while after you've saved you're gonna go right back to your last save point, there are a few checkpoints in place, but not much.
I think that save system works because every retry is going to be different with that smart Alien making you take different paths and try different things in your next run.
Also when you finally see a new save point you get that feeling of relief that you've made it to another save point instead of constant autosaves.
Also a complaint I have is the map, the map just has the marker telling you where you next objective is but it isn't that helpful as it never tells you which floor the objective is on and what not, it could take you rooms in the wrong direction before you figure it out.
Sound & Audio
The audio in this game is fantastic, from the ambiance to the Alien.
The stomping sound the Alien makes really gets you as he gets closer and closer and the soundtrack takes cues from the original film and even sounds from the movie like the alarms and such come back.
It's got the retro sci fi sound of the original film and it's just fantastic.
The voice acting is fine by me, I've heard people saying the voice acting is crap or mediocre, but I didn't find anything wrong with the voice acting, I thought they were just fine.
Verdict
9/10
The 3rd best Alien game I've played right up there with Alien Trilogy and AVP2 and yes it is defiantly better than Colonal Marines.
A fantastic survival horror game with a very long campaign, took me 17 hours to complete on Hard Mode.
Don't know why people are whining about the game being too long, although people have said that the game drags on but I think that's because people are just playing it straight through in one day or so, me I played a few hours, stopped a while and then came back and I loved the long campaign, the more the merrier for me, means I'm getting my money's worth which is a rarity these days.
A serious con I have to mention is the first hour or 2 can actually get pretty boring and hurt the game, but once the Alien shows up things get fun and scary.
Any Alien fan or survival horror fan needs to play this game, it's awesome, innovative, new and yes it is scary, especially if you have an expensive home theater with the volume up high and the sub woofer right next to you.
I just finished Alien Isolation for the PC and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to make a review on it, I rarely do reviews because most games don't excite me enough to care afterwards, but this game was just too fantastic to pass up.
After Aliens Colonal Marines I waited until the reviews showed up until I bought this game and since the common opinion was positive I felt like it was a safe buy, so I started playing it on Thursday.
Story
The story of Alien Isloation is pretty simple, set between the events of Alien and Aliens featuring Ellen Ripley's daughter Amanda's quest to find out more about her mother's disappearance.
Amanda travels to a space station known as the Sevastopol to find the flight recorder of the Nostromo that has been found by a scavenge team.
However Amanda soon finds out that an Alien is also on the Sevastopol and has caused chaos.
I won't go any further into the story since I don't want to reveal spoilers, but I thought the story was good.
Cutscenes are pre rendered with noticeably not so good lip sync, but that doesn't matter to me personally.
I felt that the ending however left a lot out and that could have been handled better.
Visuals & Performance
As everyone has probably noticed already, the visuals in Alien Isolation are beyond spectacular, the lighting is superb, the particles are just brilliant and it really creates an atmosphere that mimics the original film, the graphics and lighting are so well done that the game looks like real life most of the time and the flamethrower in particular looks photo realistic.
(Screenshots from my playthrough)
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
The character models are highly detailed, the weapons look fantastic, especially the flamethrower as I just said and our old friend the Alien looks stunning.
The way the lighting effects look on the Alien as he walks by look incredible.
As for performance I think the game runs very well, my PC is powered by an i5 CPU with 8GB of RAM and a Radeon R9 290 and I managed to get pretty good performance on max settings.
My frame rate varied however, at some parts in the game I would drop down to 20-30FPS while in most parts of the game I averaged 60-200FPS, I think it may have been my RAM and CPU bottle necking the GPU but even so the game runs smoothly and looks excellent.
The is is the kind of graphical level I will hold next gen games to.
Gameplay
Now comes the best part of the game, the survival horror gameplay is very good in Isolation, the controls are smooth, easy to use and full body awareness is always welcome in my First Person games.
The whole game you're going to be hiding, sneaking and using your crafted items to survive.
The human and android segments suck so bad sadly, I hate them, their AI is dumb and they just come off as frustrating, especially later on in the game where you come across these new kind of androids that can't be harmed or affected by any of your crafted items, the only thing you can really do is run from them, unless you have a certain weapon acquired later on the game.
The crafting system is pretty simple and easy to use, you simply find the parts needed that are scattered throughout the game. Items like pipe bombs, molotovs, flash bangs, EMP bombs etc can all be crafted and are pretty useful.
Also you can get certain weapons in the game like a 6 shooter pistol, flamethrower and others however all but the flamethrower are useless against the Alien.
The flamethrower can scare the Alien off for a short time, but the flamethrower uses up ammo REALLY fast and it sometimes doesn't work as much as even blasting the Alien with the flamethrower the Alien will sometimes still pounce through the flames and knock you over, taking health off you.
Now my favorite part, The Alien.
The Alien is the big threat of the game and is so not scripted, he never does the same thing twice, is always hunting you and is 100% unpredictable. There were some parts in the game where I thought he was programmed not to show up for story purposes but nope he can show up at any time and any place and especially when you least expect it, you are never safe from him.
He'll even show up in the android and human segments making them even harder.... or easier as he'll hunt the other humans too, but he'll ignore the androids.
His AI is excellent and something innovative, he always takes different paths and even sits and waits to ambush you sometimes, you have to be careful and watch for his signs otherwise he'll get you and he's always learning and adapting to your tactics too, I used a flare to keep him paused one time so could make an escape, but when I tried it again it didn't work and he got me.
Also just because you don't hear or see him doesn't mean he isn't there.
Alien shot 1
Alien says ello mate!!
The Alien can be a bit glitchy at times as I was in a vent one time and the Alien crawled in, looked right at me then clipped right throw me and continued up a ladder. But that didn't happen to me much.
Also I've seen people complain about the save system in the game, however I think the save system is perfect for this game, the save system works via these save points similar to the typewriters of Resident Evil, they are a pretty fair distance in between and if you die a while after you've saved you're gonna go right back to your last save point, there are a few checkpoints in place, but not much.
I think that save system works because every retry is going to be different with that smart Alien making you take different paths and try different things in your next run.
Also when you finally see a new save point you get that feeling of relief that you've made it to another save point instead of constant autosaves.
Also a complaint I have is the map, the map just has the marker telling you where you next objective is but it isn't that helpful as it never tells you which floor the objective is on and what not, it could take you rooms in the wrong direction before you figure it out.
Sound & Audio
The audio in this game is fantastic, from the ambiance to the Alien.
The stomping sound the Alien makes really gets you as he gets closer and closer and the soundtrack takes cues from the original film and even sounds from the movie like the alarms and such come back.
It's got the retro sci fi sound of the original film and it's just fantastic.
The voice acting is fine by me, I've heard people saying the voice acting is crap or mediocre, but I didn't find anything wrong with the voice acting, I thought they were just fine.
Verdict
9/10
The 3rd best Alien game I've played right up there with Alien Trilogy and AVP2 and yes it is defiantly better than Colonal Marines.
A fantastic survival horror game with a very long campaign, took me 17 hours to complete on Hard Mode.
Don't know why people are whining about the game being too long, although people have said that the game drags on but I think that's because people are just playing it straight through in one day or so, me I played a few hours, stopped a while and then came back and I loved the long campaign, the more the merrier for me, means I'm getting my money's worth which is a rarity these days.
A serious con I have to mention is the first hour or 2 can actually get pretty boring and hurt the game, but once the Alien shows up things get fun and scary.
Any Alien fan or survival horror fan needs to play this game, it's awesome, innovative, new and yes it is scary, especially if you have an expensive home theater with the volume up high and the sub woofer right next to you.
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