Tag: space

Alien: Isolation

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 20th 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. 

RimWorld – Impressions

The Harrowing Trials and Tribulations of the Potato People

I held off on playing RimWorld for years after it first started showing up in my Steam discovery queue and my suggested YouTube videos. In terms of gameplay and premise, it was right up my street, but the visuals always turned me off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some shallow ingrate concerned only with aesthetics, but a large part of the appeal of sim games for me is the visual interest of watching your settlement, theme park, zoo or other grow, and viewing the interactions of the denizens within. I can while away hours watching a junction in Cities: Skylines, for example, just observing as the traffic builds up, then filters through, then builds up, then filters through. Edit a junction or change a stretch of road, watch how it changes the flow. Watch the traffic build up, then filter through. I have a full and productive life.

Anyway, it was the hilariously and informatively presented videos of a YouTuber called ambiguousamphibian that finally caused me to take the plunge. 30 hours of gameplay later, here are my initial thoughts.

I really don’t like the visuals. Nothing has legs or arms, and everyone looks like a little potato person. Sometimes a colonist will have interesting hair, giving them some visual character, but then they’ll immediately put a hat on so that they look like a little potato man again. When they get shot or stabbed or scratched by cougars, cuts and slashes appear on them, giving the disturbing impression that they’re potatoes that bleed. I understand that the graphics are representative, and that rendering arms and legs would be quite an undertaking considering your colonists can and will lose limbs and then replace them with bionic implants, but I find it difficult to get attached to the little potato people, probably more so than if they were represented by icons or text.

If you can’t make out the text there, it’s saying that Cauchois’ brain is a mangled scar thanks to a shot from a revolver. This has … slowed her down somewhat. She used to be my finest builder.

The environment textures are very lacking as well. I immediately downloaded a mod that sharpens up the textures but you’re still going to be looking at basic, bare minimum visuals for the entirety. It’s fine, it is what it is, I wish there was a more appealing visual solution for a million-selling game, but I signed up for the addictive progression-based gameplay, the situations that can arise, and the stories that can play out.

RimWorld nails all of that stuff, especially if you’re brave and play on the harder difficulties. It’s the sort of game that generates water cooler talk. If you’re lucky enough to have a pal who also plays the game, you’ll be regaling each other with tales of tribal raids, cold snaps, giant insect infestations and killer guinea pig attacks for months to come.

A few years back, my wife and I used to play The Sims 3 a lot. We had completely different play-styles. She would create the perfect Sim, take total control of their lives, get them to work every morning, and try to make them as happy and fulfilled as possible (that’s if she ever got past meticulously creating said Sim’s perfect abode with the infinite money cheat). I would create a household of three or four, give them a mixture of good and bad traits, give the AI the maximum amount of control and just let events unfold, only intervening if I absolutely needed to.

There was another guy in this colony called Hella, but he died when a cougar bit off his arm. Said cougar ended up as lunch for the other colonists. It’s a harsh world sometimes.

RimWorld really rewards players who are somewhere in between the two. You’ll have to be in control to ensure your colonists survive the raids, harsh winters and other such dangerous occurrences the computer will throw at you, but rolling with the game’s mischievous tendencies to throw seemingly insurmountable odds at you is essential to really experiencing what RimWorld has to offer. It’s a story creator, and sometimes said stories may be tragic or hopeless, but they’re always fascinating. If you’re the type of player who would quit and reload if your favourite colonist got his arm ripped off by a passing warg, then this game isn’t for you. You’ve got to accept the rough as well as the smooth to get the ultimate RimWorld experience, and you’ll probably need lots of time to spare, too.

At only thirty hours and three colonies deep, I don’t really feel qualified to review RimWorld. I’ve not come anywhere near the endgame, and have barely scratched the surface of what this indie gem has to offer. However, I can say some things for certain already; this game is meticulously crafted, addictive, near-limitless in breadth, often melancholic in tone, and chock full of little potato people. It’s definitely got a-peel.