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| Like coming out, it gets better by Rafiki 08/16/2020, 1:57pm PDT | ||||
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| Good, not great, there's good stuff and some bullshitty stuff. I'd recommend it. I think someone could take this formula and turn out something pretty great, if it hasn't been done already.
My initial impressions are so mean and makes the game seem terrible! Hilarious! I stand by them, though. For literally the first hour you're wandering around the station with little to no threat with lots of spooOOoOooky sounds and random attempts at scares, but there's no danger. The game was trying to establish an atmosphere, but it took too long. About 10 minutes in I realized there was no threat, so I just bolted through the area. This is one of the big conflicts of storytelling when players have control. The minute I stop buying in, it's over. The 40,000 man-hours you invested in meticulously crafting a haunted house with AAA sound effects and lighting and art and animation is wasted since I don't notice any of the scares because they all happen in the breeze I'm leaving in my wake. Once the threats were introduced, it was far more effective because I had to slow the fuck down and there were things I had to actually be afraid of. I was in the same place as everyone else in the first few hours in that I just found the game exhausting. It was compelling, but frustrating and unfun because of constant, confusing failure. But yeah, once you figure the alien out it gets more gamey, for better or worse. I did actually wind up enjoying the stealth and sneaking aspect a lot more than I expected. There wasn't quite as much standing around and waiting on patrol routes as a typical stealth game, because the alien patrol is more random and hiding in the same place too long would generally cause the game to automatically tell the alien where you are, so I was motivated to move more. It did feel incredibly annoying and unfair when I would distract the alien away, walk halfway across the space station into another sector, and despite not making a single sound the alien would still automatically run through the vents to my area and drop down to start patrolling. Sure, it would probably ruin the game if you could just walk 2 rooms away and never encounter the alien again, but it still felt cheap. There's also the possibility of having to work stealth against the androids and humans, but that largely depends on how good you are at scavenging and shooting. I was flush with ammo and inventory, so in the segments without the alien it just reverted to a standard shooter. On the one hand this was a nice relief from the constant tension of dealing with the alien, but on the other hand these were probably the weakest parts of the game. The game was really inconsistent about noise. Mechanical noisemaker? Summons the alien, distracts it. Android burbling about? Completely ignored. If you so much as squeeze out a fart, the alien will leap from the shadows and pursue you, but you can take a torch, cut through giant metal panels, and let the panels slam to the ground with no consequence! Even with smaller panels you don't catch them so as not to make noise, you just let them clang onto the ground. No problem! Also, I'm fairly certain exiting a hiding place produces noise that can cause the alien to return to your location. So when stepping out of a storage locker, do you a) delicately and gingerly open the door, quietly step out, and close it behind you, or do you b) FAAALLLCON PUNCH!!! the motherfucking door off of the hinges and into the opposite wall? If you said b), welcome to Caltrops, Amanda Ripley. Can we talk about the retarded story? ===SPOILERS=== Ok, so Marlowe is going to nuke his ship and blow up the space station, himself, you, and everyone else. Marlowe: We need to destroy this thing and every trace of it. We can't let Weyland-Yutani get ahold of it. If the alien gets in contact with humans, it's over. The alien has won. Me: This is the most rational and sensible thing that has ever been said in an Aliens story. I actually completely agree with this. Amanda: You don't have to do this! Me: Bitch, where have you been for 10 hours? Law chick: There are still people aboard the station! Me: [thinking back on all of the corpses and the fact that every single person I encounter ends up dying] Umm...not really. Also: bitch, where have you been for 10 hours? So then I'm required to sabotage the explosion. Law chick and Marlowe die. Fast-forward to the end of the game. The space station is obliterated in the nearby planet's atmosphere, killing everyone who was probably already dead anyways. Why in the FUCK didn't I just let the nuke go off? The game should have ended here. Ok, so sperglords would have flipped their shit because I guess there was a deleted scene in Aliens where they said Amanda lives to a ripe old age and dies, so make something up where she's thrown clear from the explosion into outer space. It would still fit with the final cutscene and wouldn't be any more stupid. |
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