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Aliens: Dark Descent review: decent, if desperate to sit with the cool console kidsWhat if XCOM but with aliens?
What if XCOM but with aliens?
Image credit:Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Focus Entertainment
Dark Descent is not a game forstrategy gamefans nearly as much as it’s one for Aliens fans. You order your entire squad around at the same time, pausing or slowing time to issue commands like grenades or suppressive fire, using a stock of command points that refill over time. It’s a game that’s (rightly) decided that a very particular type of strategy game is the best format to convey Aliens’ whole schtick, but then seems to have realised, hang on, we’re at risk of (alien) isolating and possibly even (alien)ating a lot of potential customers here. What if there was a way to doXCOMbut without all the knobbly bits?
Aliens Dark Descent - Story TrailerWatch on YouTube
Aliens Dark Descent - Story Trailer
It’s the apparent disdain for “micromanagement” that’s done it. Instead of controlling each member of your squad of four marines individually, you control them all as a single unit, with the game using its “state of the art thinking-is-for-nerds priority system” or whatever the trailers called it, to decide which marine is best equipped at any given moment to do the specific task you want doing. Need to heal a marine, and it’ll pick your medic, if you have one. Need to open a crate or weld a door shut, and it’ll pick the closest unoccupied marine. Want to have three of your marines stay behind cover ready to fire, and one of your marines edge towards an automatic door just close enough for it to open and give you a clear shot at whatever’s lurking behind it? Whoa, slow down there, Sun Tzu! Any more hysterics out of you and we might have to grab the icepick and hammer! You’ll move as a squad, and you’ll like it.
Image credit:Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Focus Entertainment
Image credit:Focus Entertainment
I absolutely can’t blame Tindalos for wanting a game with such a recognisable and beloved license to court appeal outside of genre fans, but I also think that if you’re going to make a strategy game, you should probably make it full-heartedly. 2012’s XCOM felt like a genuine revolution in turn-based tactics, but Aliens: Dark Descent too often feels like a compromise, or, more accurately, a console-mise. If you’re thinking, wow, what a snob, then, congratulations. You get to enjoy something more fully than I did, which is much better than griping about things. Dark Descent is beautiful, engaging, and absolutely drips with authentically atmospheric Aliens goo. But, again, like those face huggers, it’s also just a bit too restrictive, and I don’t think it needed to be.
