The concept behind ALIEN: ISOLATION, a single alien, and no weapons to fight it, may sound a bit foreign in an age of annual CALL OF DUTY sequels. So much of gaming has become shoot-everything-in-sight and worry about the rest later that this feels like a breath of fresh air in the word of AAA titles.
The Alien franchise has had a long history in video games, but few games have come quite as close to being perfect as Alien: Isolation.
This sounds great as after 10 years; the soundtrack is coming in multiple formats.
IGN : On Alien: Isolation's tenth anniversary, we revisit both Creative Assembly's divisive survival horror and our own review.
The Alien Isolation review was the final review that made me stop visiting IGN regularly. My dislike of the site had already been growing, but this one was the last straw for me. An absolute joke of a review.
IGN holds a lot of power and influence (unfortunately) on the buying habits of gamers. I could understand a 7 maybe if it wasn't his thing, but to give it a 5.9... not a 6, mind you, symbolically marking it as a poorly made game. This game probably could have sold a lot more if a competent reviewer at IGN had gotten their hands on it.
I'm not saying that all reviewers should be hiveminded. IGN is a monolith in the gaming community though, a collective voice. One of their editors should have caught this before release and investigated the validity.
I do think a positive review could have pushed even more sales and maybe we would have had a proper sequel to this by now. Ask most people, hell, just look at the poll on this article.. most people still today call the game brilliant for its time, or at the very least simply "good". I heard most people praising it, even back then! My thoughts are that IGN wanted to push the review anyway without further input from the IGN team because it was edgy, and they were more interested in getting clicks for themselves.
It really seems like Ryan wanted Assassin's Creed stealth patterns and broke down when he had to actually think and react, rather than exploit poorly designed AI. IGN never had a problem giving AC's stupidly simple AI great scores.
I can't say I know what their current methods are, but assuming their reviews are done by individual people, I think they should move to do their reviews in groups. Have 4-5 people play a game, write a short review, come together and discuss and write a more extensive review based on mupltiple perspectives.
I was just going to ask if this supports VR... if not then VR2 would be great to experience it. I see there is a mod for PC though.
The game has really poor AI that cheats and teleports. Once you figure it out it's comical or downright obnoxious depending on your ability to deal with it. That's why the game either lands as a great game for some or a terrible game for others.
For me since the Alien aspect was a core mechanic it's not something I could look over, it was too jarring and finished the game with a bitter taste. Thankfully once you get the flamethrower you can just cheese your way through it as quickly as possible.
Give this a read. It's a scholarly analysis of the AI mechanics of Alien Isolation, investigating its fairness.
https://www.gamestudies.org...
It boils it down to 2 ideas: The Sublime vs the Contained (Animalistic)
What you were expecting was a fully animalistic interpretation of the beast, trackable at all times, and contained within parameters of rationale. However, the creators were going for more of a sense of the original movie, and many horror movies for that matter. Horror movies always "cheat". The monster or killer slips into the shadows, in Aliens it's usually the ceilings, which is almost treated as a void. In movies, the monster is always able to pop out of this void at the opportune times of the experience.
It's not a matter of right or wrong really. It's whether you like pure predictability, or if you're down for an attempt at shaking that up, giving the player a constant sense of being on their toes.
Further, the author of this paper explains the divisiveness of Alien Isolation by dividing the general responses into 2 camps.
"Based on their approach to gameplay, players commenting on the Alien can be roughly divided into two camps, which I will call experientialists and simulationists [9]. The former see the game primarily as an experience, while the latter see it as a simulated system. Experientialists are primarily interested in how the Alien “feels,” their point of reference often being the 1979 film. In their view, a monster should remain sublime; and too much theorizing ruins the game and breaks the suspension of disbelief. An experientialist commenter suggested that humans are not supposed to understand the Alien, because it is a creature with its own “alien logic” and “quirks” [R]. In Kirsi Kallio and her colleagues’ typology of gamer mentalities, experientialists would fall somewhere between the “entertaining” and “immersing” profiles (Kallio, Mäyrä, & Kaipainen, 2011). They consider games just one of their possible entertainment options, connect and compare them to film, and immerse themselves in the game world rather than optimize their play strategies.
Simulationists, on the other hand, observe and scrutinize the game’s mechanics, mostly in order to get better at the game. To do so, they expect the mechanics to be consistent and transparent. In the abovementioned typology, they would correspond to the “having fun” profile of players for whom “speed, progress, flow, skillfulness, and other such characteristics of a game are more important than the story or… characters” (Kallio et al., 2011, p. 344). As such, they are more likely to conceive of the Alien as a simulated zoological entity."
***Ultimately, I think they made the right call bc for many players (including myself) the game resonates with the "feel" of the original movie. Other Alien games before it were never that scary bc they maintained predictability.
Alien Isolation doesn't need defending. It's a terrific survival horror game! I sure wish there was a PSVR 2 patch for it!
Best game I played this year