Despite the myriad of unconventional genre blends I've encountered in recent years, I would never have anticipated a survival horror real-time strategy (RTS) game. Yet, that's precisely the essence of Aliens: Dark Descent. It seamlessly integrates stealth elements and nail-biting resource management into its isometric, squad-based tactical gameplay. When firing on all cylinders, it encapsulates the spirit of the 1986 film Aliens more faithfully than any game in recent memory. Unfortunately, recurring technical glitches and disruptions rear their problematic heads far too often, preventing Dark Descent from delivering a consistently smooth and enjoyable experience.
Mixing elements from XCOM, Darkest Dungeon, and Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, it's undeniable that Dark Descent is a truly distinctive game brimming with captivating ideas. While many games bearing the Aliens license have erroneously emphasized a rampage with a pulse rifle, this one excels at capturing the franchise's essence of paranoia and peril. It masterfully restores the fear factor to even the most ordinary alien drones and runners, rekindling the sense of dread they once inspired.
While it's entirely possible to adopt a guns-blazing approach and accumulate easy kills, each time a xenomorph detects you, it triggers an alarm within the hive. This sets off a countdown, causing them to multiply and become more aggressive, thereby escalating the overall mission difficulty. The preferred strategy typically involves avoiding detection altogether. However, the consequences for alerting our shiny-headed adversaries grow increasingly severe if you're already operating under a high level of hive awareness. This results in more formidable boss aliens and swarms of drones being summoned. Consequently, I often found myself engaged in heart-pounding tactical retreats through tight corridors or anxiously hiding in supply rooms, fervently hoping that the patrolling xenomorph wouldn't decide to investigate my location.
Mental Breakdown
Even battles free of wounds or burns take a toll. Simply encountering aliens, being chased during hive activation, or seeing blips on the motion tracker induces stress. This can lead to up to three random debuffs on your marines, as they adopt a 'Game over, man! Game over!' mentality, resulting in reduced accuracy, heightened anxiety, or even squad disobedience. The more horrors they face, the less effective they are in combat.
The way this intertwines with the hive awareness system, forming a natural progression from those initial, tantalizing skirmishes against a lone drone, to the sensation that chaos has erupted, where one misstep could spell the complete annihilation of your squad, is nothing short of brilliance. It lends a human dimension to all your soldiers while compelling you to carefully strategize how to manage both their physical and psychological well-being. At times, it's more prudent to signal the dropship and abort a mission with unfinished objectives, incurring a costly time setback on the campaign map, but preserving the lives of your fighters. This dynamic ensures that every mission mirrors the tension of a classic Alien movie, featuring a gradual buildup leading to a harrowing crescendo of shrieks and gunfire.
The abundance of remarkable design concepts leaves me in a state of conflict when it comes to assessing Dark Descent's technical state. While it generally holds up well enough that I could overlook minor, quirky bugs like out-of-sync dialogue in cutscenes, there were instances where I had to replay entire missions due to fundamental mechanics not functioning as intended. This persisted even after a substantial and admittedly beneficial patch was introduced during the review process. For example, a secure room that I had sealed off using valuable engineering resources failed to provide my marines with the intended rest and stress reduction, resulting in a significant loss of momentum. In another case, the stress meter inexplicably remained at its highest level even in the absence of any alien threats, causing my entire squad to lose their composure and necessitating an immediate extraction.
These problems occur with a frequency and severity that prevent me from simply overlooking them. While many can be painstakingly mitigated by restarting a mission, this often results in losing over an hour of hard-earned progress. Throughout the entire 12-mission campaign, which took me approximately 30 hours to complete, I'd estimate that at least a few of those hours were spent replaying missions that glitched or being forced to retreat due to technical issues, only to return to the same location with a fresh squad.
The problems occur with a frequency that's a tad too common and with a degree of game-breaking impact that's slightly excessive.
The campaign layer, fortunately, isn't plagued by as many issues. From your base aboard the crashed USCM vessel USS Otago, you'll oversee research, medical facilities, training, equipment, and even a therapy clinic for addressing long-term psychological issues in a manner reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon. The user interface (UI) is generally clean and well-organized, although it's not entirely without its peculiarities. For instance, it's unclear why I can't upgrade a marine's gear directly from the same page where I assign them new skill
Progression can feel somewhat meager, particularly considering that each passing day escalates the planetary infestation and augments the number of patrolling xenos on every map. A level 10 marine only exhibits marginal superiority compared to a rookie, especially concerning the Bravery stat, which dictates how swiftly they accumulate stress. Nevertheless, the game boasts a range of diverse classes, including the iconic smart-gunner and the sergeant tasked with preventing anyone from going AWOL. This diversity offers ample room for specialization and synergistic strategies to explore.
The game comes with a gripping narrative that pleasantly deviates from the familiar Alien film plots. It introduces morally complex characters with intriguing motivations at the forefront. However, the voice acting can be uneven, mainly due to the lack of distinct marine voices, making it challenging to differentiate your whole team effectively. Furthermore, there were instances where the mood was disrupted by constant shouts from the squad leader, like "DOUBLE TIME!", during stealthy moments. Nonetheless, the central characters offer truly memorable performances, especially in the most dramatic sequences.
Moreover, these environments boast stunning visuals that vividly encapsulate not only the style but also the atmosphere of James Cameron's iconic masterpiece. The eerie manner in which the fog illuminates when a flashlight pierces through it faithfully recreates the film's masterful use of light and shadow. The sound design further enhances this atmosphere, with the disconcerting squish-squish as you tread through the alien-infested regions of the planet Lethe. Along the journey, a diverse range of mission and objective types prevents each deployment from feeling overly repetitive. As you progress, there are even intriguing twists that introduce new and unexpected enemy types.
The Final Verdict
If not for the technical issues, this would undeniably stand as one of the finest Aliens games to date, and in many ways, it still might be. Drawing inspiration from some of the most exceptional squad-based tactics games while infusing its own innovations, I haven't encountered anything that captures the essence of what made Aliens, the film, so captivating since Monolith's Aliens Versus Predator 2, which dates all the way back to 2001. Many have attempted, but few have succeeded. It's the kind of game that makes me wish I could overlook its flaws and sing its praises even louder, but when considering the overall balance, I find it challenging to do so. With a few weeks in the metaphorical "med bay" for some additional technical polish, it has the potential to transform into something truly extraordinary. As it stands, it remains an intriguing, inspired, and imaginative survival RTS that I can wholeheartedly recommend, albeit with a few caveats.
