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Is This a Rescue Mission, or Another Bug Hunt?

One of the last scripts I wrote for the sadly-defunct TripleJump YouTube channel was a giant list ranking every single Alien and/or Predator video game ever made. Unfortunately, the channel went under before the video was released, but here’s a peek behind the curtain for you; Sega’s 2014 survival horror hit, Alien: Isolation, was at number one. However, despite heavily featuring the perfect organism in a starring role, Alien: Isolation isn’t a perfect game, but it is probably the closest a video game has come to perfectly capturing the atmosphere of the movie franchise upon which it’s based, Alien or otherwise.

This is Amanda Ripley. Her family line has pretty appalling luck when it comes to run-ins with predatory space bugs.

Creatively assembled by British studio, Creative Assembly, who are most well known for the Total War series and its combination of real-time battles and grand strategy, Alien: Isolation took the developers into unfamiliar territory. With very little experience in the survival horror genre, Creative Assembly made a host of outside hires, and soon enough a 100-strong team were orchestrating visceral encounters and crafting ’70s-style retro tech.

The crew were reportedly handed around three terabytes of production material from 20^th Century Fox, and through deconstructing this “gold mine” of information, they were able to build a startlingly authentic world that specifically recalled the atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s 1979 original. Stellar lighting and graphical effects, flawless sound design, and a talented cast of voice actors all combined with this vision to create one of the most atmospheric and genuine movie-to-game experiences ever seen.

For a game released in 2014, Alien: Isolation’s environments can look pretty insane. The character models are showing their age a bit though.

It’s pretty scary, too. For most of the game, the player character (Amanda Ripley, daughter of the legendary Ellen Ripley) is completely defenceless against the overwhelming speed, power, and bitey bits of the towering xenomorph, and will have to sneak around quietly, hiding in every available nook, cranny, or orifice in order to avoid a swift and gory demise. They even made it so that the alien can hear sounds that come through your mic, breaking the fourth wall in an unsettling manner and making it so that the hoot of an errant owl in your living room can spell death for poor old Amanda. I told you to keep that window shut.

As I already mentioned, though, this is not a perfect game. Progression can fall into a trial and error process at times, and clever players can work out the xenomorph’s AI, thus being able to manipulate the initially panic-inducing monstrosity into easily-avoidable loops. On the other end of that scale, less proficient players might find themselves constantly harassed by the chitinous terror’s perpetual presence, with observers noting that the xenomorph’s AI tends to be a little too adept at homing in on Miss Ripley even when it should logically be at the other end of the station, violently breaking and entering the cranium of some other defenceless schlub.

Can I tell you a secret? I haven’t finished this game. It’s just too long.

It’s at times like this when Alien: Isolation’s cloying horror can teeter on the verge of aggravation and annoyance, and players might find themselves desensitised to Amanda’s torso getting brutally severed by the xenomorph’s spiky tail after the fourteenth time in a row while fear turns to frustration and frustration turns to controller-throwing rage. All of this, along with long stretches of dealing with the less-interesting android enemies, means that Sega’s most beloved Alien adaptation can outstay its welcome a bit.

During its high points, though, Alien: Isolation is excellent – a stunning interpretation of the first film’s timeless atmosphere and an almost unbearably tense and trouser-ruining experience throughout. As the game celebrated its ten-year anniversary in October 2024, Creative Assembly employee and Alien: Isolation creative director, Al Hope, confirmed that the team are working on a follow-up, and if they iron out the annoyances that made Alien: Isolation fall just short of all-time great status, this follow-up has a chance to be the best sequel since Aliens.

The Seegson androids have more in common with Ash than Bishop. That’s a bad thing.

This article was written for the now-defunct Sega Force Mega as part of a planned Halloween special featuring lots of Sega-published Halloween-appropriate games, alongside The Ooze and Devilish. This is the last unpublished article I’d written for that magazine. I updated the intro to reflect the fact that TripleJump are also now defunct.

Become a Vessel of Destruction

Despite not being a “boomer” (I’m D-Generation X, baby), I’m quite fond of Boomer Shooters. Anything that reminds me of simpler times blasting away on the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Hexen on my Sega Saturn is going to have a decent shot at earning my affections. Also, I like that they don’t tend to be too much of a time commitment, and can make for a straightforward and violent palette cleanser between lengthy RPGs or modern cinematic action games that demand lots of hours and dedication.

These days, I tend to try to be a physical-only gamer, as I enjoy feeding the shelves in the rumpus room almost as much as I enjoy playing a good video game, and in the last few years I’ve finished the (as far as I’m aware) only three Boomer Shooters that you can buy physically for the Nintendo Switch: Ion Fury, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, and now, finally, Prodeus.

You’ll be mowing down so many minions of Chaos you’ll think you were playing Space Marine 2! (I completed that, too, by the way)

I didn’t write about the first two games so I’ll very briefly sum up my opinions on them here. Ion Fury is a fantastic Duke Nukem 3D love-letter that has been tastefully modernised in all the right places, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a satisfying blast through the endless minions of Nurgle and Tzeentch that often pushes Nintendo’s ageing HDMI-enabled tablet beyond breaking point when it comes to framerate.

That leaves Prodeus, which I purchased sometime in 2024 and finally got around to playing in January of 2025. The game was developed by Bounding Box Software and was the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign. It offers multiplayer content as well as a single player mode, but I don’t dabble with multiplayer these days. I like my peace and quiet, you know? This will be a review of the campaign only.

The plot of Prodeus is purposefully left fairly ambiguous. From what I can fathom from the pre-stage descriptions, the game takes place on an asteroid that’s being mined for fuel (and possibly artefacts) and two opposing, interdimensional forces have converged on said asteroid to enact some kind of cosmic war. These two forces are Chaos, who have a demonic vibe and can apparently turn human soldiers into Doom-style zombies, and Prodeus, who are technologically advanced entities of light who can wrest control of Chaos’ demonic units, turning them into upgraded, blue-tinted versions of themselves.

As for the protagonist? Well, it’s hard to tell. There’s an opening sequence where they get killed horribly and then awoken in some kind of tank, and in-game text occasionally refers to them as a “Vessel”, but that’s about all you’ve got to go on. The Doom-style portrait at the bottom of the screen (that appears more skull-like as you take damage), has a cybernetically-enhanced super-soldier aesthetic, so maybe they’re some kind of Prodeus experiment that went rogue, but it’s all a bit vague. The setting is compelling enough, though, and you won’t be thinking too hard about the nuances of character development when you’re blasting something’s face off with four concurrent super shotgun shells.

Which one is the Keymaster and which one is the Gatekeeper?

All of the guns in Prodeus are great, and the game starts you off simple with a very satisfying pistol. All of the usable weapons are split across five different types of ammo, and each ammo type will feed every weapon in that class. These are bullets, shells, rockets, energy and chaos, and the different guns in the various classes all do a fine job of staying relevant as you unlock new implements of destruction. Even weapons that you’d think would be very similar or just straight upgrades, like the shotgun and the super shotgun, are different enough to drastically change gameplay. The shotgun fires more shells before needing to reload and has a secondary mode that’s a bit more effective at range, while the super shotgun can fire all four loaded shells in a satisfying blast that’ll leave all but the most elite enemy types with a severe case of bloody dismemberment.

Speaking of which, the blood effects are on point, too, with enemies exploding very satisfyingly and painting floors and walls in a tasteful shade of crimson. If a baddie pops in a tight enough space its insides will even cover the ceiling, and this results in a generous period of dripping gore, giving the game a very violent and visceral air.

Even when they’re not covered in copious helpings of tomato sauce, Prodeus’ environments look great. The visuals are purposefully very pixelated (although it looks less so in motion than the screenshots would have you believe), but the game still has a sleek feel with heaps of atmosphere. Many of the locations are quite alien and abstract, especially once you enter the Prodeus dimension, and the whole thing is built on a very dark base colour scheme with orange or blue highlights depending on whether Prodeus or Chaos are in the ascendancy at that point in the campaign. The game could be accused of looking quite samey, but a couple of highlights, like the Space Station or the dark, rainy ocean environment in the Trench level, do manage to provide some memorable focal points along the way.

As for the gameplay; it’s extremely solid. The controls are crisp and responsive, I only noticed two sections where the framerate took a noticeable hit, and the enemy variety keeps things interesting right through to the end of the game, in part thanks to the more-powerful Prodeus-controlled versions of Chaos enemies that appear later on. While most levels consist of moving through environments, locating the odd key card, and taking out groups of enemies as you go, some stages are straight up arenas that throw enemy waves of ascending difficulty at you, just to keep things spicy. The aforementioned key card hunting doesn’t overstay its welcome either, and serves as a nice throwback to similar mechanics in the games Prodeus is so clearly influenced by.

The Prodeus campaign is a dark and dismal, viscera-soaked treat for fans of old-school FPS action, and the “boomer shooter” style gameplay is spot on. There are plenty of difficulty levels to dabble with, depending on whether you want to barely survive each encounter as a wounded, bloody wreck, or feel like an invincible god-warrior who effortlessly leaves a gory wake of destruction in their path. The locations are grimy, intimidating, and occasionally awe-inspiring, and the music, while not necessarily all that memorable, provides a fine accompaniment to the flying bullets, plasma, and Chaos energy.

The environments get quite a bit more ominous as you progress.

Where would I rate it alongside Ion Fury and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, you ask? Well, that’s a tough one. For thrills and personality, I’d rank it just below Ion Fury, but then, Duke Nukem 3D was the shooter I jammed with the most when I was but an eager young gamer. I’d probably say Prodeus plays a little better than Boltgun, though, just feeling that little bit crisper and clearer, although the fact that I played both games on the Switch could be affecting that decision.

Still, they’re all winners in my eyes, and that’s the important thing. Now I’m just waiting for that perfect modern re-imagining of Hexen to come out physically on the Switch. I heard Graven turned out to be a bit of a let-down though. Shame, that.