Aliens: Dark Descent

Cheers for the info Frog.

Yeah but you liked redfall for a bit so that tells us all we need to know about your standards missy 😉

Currently playing it, just done the basic tutorial, it is fucking great so far.

God Is A Geek’s review was overwhelmingly positive. Goofy channel name aside, I usually like their reviews.

7/10 from IGN: www.ign.com/articles/aliens-dark-descent-review

Yeah I definitely want to buy it and I knew nothing of it before yesterday. I'm not going to though because I have a never ending list of games to complete. I must have at least 12 installed to play, currently on diablo 4 after temporarily shelving the new Zelda. There is not enough time in the day. Someone needs to invent a pill that means you don't need to sleep so I could game from midnight to eight in the morning.

After playing it for an evening I'm very happy, that God is a Geek review is pretty spot on in how I feel about it too although I will say the PS5 version seems to be a lot more stable than the PC one he played, other than one pathfinding issue in the tutorial it's been solid.

As I said earlier hard is hard so fuck knows how difficult nightmare is but it's a good level of challenge and I'm damn glad I didn't switch on the Iron Man save setting, that really should be for a replay. It's tense enough creeping around trying to avoid xenos, which you want to do a stand up fight can go very wrong quickly, the lack of light adds a lot of fear but your motion tracker works very well, possibly a bit too well so using sprint (which stops your marines from shooting) is something you use more than I expected if there's nothing detected.

Glad there's an option to switch from slow mo to pause when issuing the actions, that makes it a lot more controllable especially in situations where you may want to be firing grenades while backing up and tossing a flare at the same time. Being able to use the ARC (the mini APC that the game has) to drive about the map and also drop off survivors to is really handy, it also has a big gun which is nice if you need to run for a bit. One part of a mission I was indoors checking stuff out and heard gunfire and I initially thought maybe there was a sentry gun I hadn't noticed and then realised it was the ARC mopping up some Xenos I didn't know about.

The rest mechanic is pretty useful, get in a room, seal all the entrances and let your marines have a breather, this reduces panic and can heal up as well, it also triggers a save with the difficulty setting I've got set. The saving is pretty handy as otherwise the checkpointing can be quite infrequent. Early on, possibly not in some missions, it does allow you to just return to the ARC and get out, handy if you just did a major event and your team is fucked and low on resources, you can then return the following day, presumably with fresher marines and continue.

There's a couple of things that aren't so good, the use of the exact same lines for doing things like picking up datapads and looting boxes with the marine wondering what's inside (especially annoying when it's got an ammo or welding kit symbol on it) gets really grating, hopefully they patch that to be far more infrequent and the character models are pretty damn shonky, you don't really seem them most of the time in close up but when you do you wonder how they let them through. I'm not expecting Unreal metahumans but they're not good.

In summary it's great and the last thing I did after my few hours playing last night was fight off an onslaught (huge amount of xenos are sent to kill you all) I knew it was coming set up my sentry gun to cover the direction they would come from, set up two people on suppressive fire (ammo is a lot less of an issue when you realise you can zoom in on the map and see pick ups) and fired some grenades. It all worked perfectly, with little damage to the team. As I was packing up my sentry gun and preparing to move, two xenos appeared behind me through an alien wall vent thing and killed one marine, abducted another and left the other two in a real state. I thought it was time for me to call it a night, bloody xenos!

This isn't a deal breaker, but it actually might be.

Have they nailed the Pulse Rifle sound?

It's been a few days, are you all still enjoying this?

Yeah it's damn good, one thing I wish I'd unlocked flamers sooner though, bloody hell they're excellent. Laying down a huge wall of fire really helps when defending and lights up areas great.

According to the devs the next patch will do something about the too frequent dialogue use, which is very much needed.

What's this like on console? Shader shutter seems to be an issue on PC due to UE4.

I figured out where I was going wrong and basically the pertinent info is contained in Whizzo’s post. The area I was stuck in had no haven areas and all the combat had turned the alien ‘heat’ up, triggering horde waves. You have to be prepared in those circumstances to credulous back pedal and extract before continuing the mission on another expedition. All told it took me three runs to clear the first mission proper.

Just unlocked the other two iconic weapons with the flame unit and smart gun and now it feels properly ‘Aliens’.

It remains to be seen whether the game can maintain the promise all the way through but so far I’m really happy with it.

It sounds great.
So if you get too stuck on a mission you can retreat out and then try it again once things have died down?
Sounds like either a great or a terrible mechanic.

If you all have flamers and sentry guns by the first mission, I do wonder a bit how they're going to keep things fresh and introduce new weapons/equipment/enemies as the game goes on.