I am playing this right now and I love it. It has fantastic atmosphere, awesome dynamic music, and I am literally scared when I play it. I am sure it will get old after a bit, but for now, it is scary.
It is a mix between Outlast and the movie Alien, and if you like atmospheric horror games with stealth and love the original Alien film, you will like this game. I am about 5 hours into it on PS4.
Just finished it. Took me around 25+ hours. Game was fun but it started to drag toward the end. I think it's way to long. Way to much back tracking to pad the length. The alien starts to get annoying once you realize it is basically leashed to you. The game would of been much more scary and tense if the alien appeared much less. After a while the scare factor goes away because it's always around you. They really should of gave the alien the ability to crawl on the walls and not constantly stomp around searching. Makes it look clumsy and kind of stupid. The alien in the movie was more of an ambusher lay in wait kind of killer.
You can tell the folks that made this are huge fans of the source material and it shows. The music, atmosphere and graphics are top notch. This is the best alien game I've played hands down. Not perfect but worth the purchase.
"oh don't waste the flashlight"
"Oh I got to change the difficulty because there are no batteries at the beginning in hard mode"
"Oh you shouldn't sneak around and wrench all the people to death"
"Oh don't just walk past the Alien casually and unlock the door like its not even there"
Basically my brother is scared of Video Games.
I hear you can get it to work on Occulus Rift to work with it which sounds promising.
I played about 2 hours, the game plays exactly like it should. It seems clear to me that the negative reviews that the game websites are giving are either because Sega didn't pay the "Give me a Good review Tax" or maybe they just don't like survival horror. I mean I guess the game could turn to dog shit later, but I don't see how you could argue from the time I had with it that it's anything other than what it claimed to be. Its a survival horror, there are some people in it besides the Alien, but they don't take precedence for most of the game, and combat doesn't seem like the best way to handle every situation (although I managed to Gordon Freeman/Solid Snake the first 4 hostile people. But that was dumb'd down normal mode because my brother bitched out when he realized they don't give you flashlight batteries off-the-bat in hardmode, pussy). I'll amend my review if my feelings change, because I ended up buying it for myself for my PC after I played it with my chicken shit brother on an xbox 360, and the graphics weren't special (but they look great on people's PCs and my PC should be able to handle it no prob).
Wow yeah IGN and Gamespot are definitely manipulating their scores.
My rating having played 5 hours on the PC is a 9.5---the minimum reasonable score for a game of this caliber is an 8. The production quality is Triple A, atmosphere, music score, graphics, attention to detail....any of these alone warrant higher than a 5 or a 6, avg user reviews have this in the 8-9 range. I dealt with one bug with a script not triggering, otherwise it's been clean. The game play is a survival horror, not a action paced game like RE4. This is genuine Survival Horror, you can't knock it for actually behaving to it's genre. This is probably one of the best Survival Horror's I've played in years, and the only reasonable assumption is IGN and Gamespot are intentionally lowering their ratings, for reasons outside the context of the game.
I have never respected the opinion of those 2 sites , they are garbage and just want traffic to their sites with such scores. IGN with its peddling of paid betas of games and Gamespot being Gamespot , fuck both those sites.
Well I'll finish it up tonight or tomorrow (I only play this at night), but to go from a 9 to a 5.9, does the game turn into crayola pictures with 5 year old voice overs?
Pain staking effort went into the atmosphere, ambiance, and design of the Game, to match as closely as possible Scott Ridley's Alien.
The ubiquitous buzzing Cathode Tube styled Terminals of the era, easily mistaken as a sound of a far more nefarious origin, by an already edgy player.
The original sound track eschewing muted curiosity, to the booming scores that indicate the most heart pounding circumstance.
The art, and models borrow with great enthuse from the source, while including their own subtle touch ups.
The team assembled to put this game together, went about with what appears an obsessed determination to create a standalone story line, that feels like it was a part of the first movie.
The game abides very rigorously the rules of traditional Survival Horror, it is not about winning but surviving an un-killable threat that stalks you nearly the length of the game.
Imagine a Ninja stalking hapless fools, jumping down from roofs to murder the meek.
And you are one of those hapless meek fools (at surface level anyway).
It cannot be destroyed, it cannot be out run, your options for the majority of the game are to move with caution, to hide liberally, and avoid at all cost.
Alternately you may decide to turn your back, drop trow, and spread cheeks, because the moment it sees you there is very nearly only one conclusion, personally I like to save some time and just pause and reload from my last save.
The negatives:
The story drags on longer than it need be, with input driven cut scenes that aren't especially difficult, but just all together unnecessary.
There is some lack of diversity in the game mechanics:
items fall into one of these categories:
-Story essential keys to mechanically simulate unlocking doors, which occur to generously so as to make a helpless feeling become somewhat mundane and uneventful.
-Throwing projectiles usually meant for avoidance tactics,
-Sparse number of weapons that you'll probably use only a handful of times for specific scenarios.
Hiding from the Alien becomes a bit to predictable and even on hard difficulty I found myself taking unnecessary risks because the AI, while fairly intelligent, is regularly predictable. The encounters of the Alien could have used with more parsing. It was always evidently clear when the Alien was there, and when I could lower my inhibitions because I knew with a certainity there was no Alien to fear. Less Alien, and more uncertainity would have done better.
I can't really comment on the plot without spoilers, but I will say its rehashed, and although I can't descredit the Developers for sticking true, the actual motivations behind the driving forces at play don't make a lot of sense when looked at objectively.
Basically I don't get the Companies obessesion with Xenomorph, I know ash had is own unique obssession, but its a barely sentient creature, I can appreciate the interest in the Engineers per Prometheus, but the Alien is at its core a giant dumb bug incapable of space travel, that an entire organization would willingly devote all its resources to one Synthetic's (the guy Bishop was designed from) weird Alien fetish...to the point of destroying an enormous space installation. Look at the engineering feat that is the reactor core, and tell me a stupid unthinking beast that's only good at scaring and destroying unarmed humans, could somehow be more valuable.
In my experience I was able to complete the game on hard fairly easily and was disappointed to learn there was no higher difficulty unlocked, your mileage may very (my teeth where cut on Counter Strike and EQ, not COD and WOW). Difficulty is a component of Survival Horror, part of creating the environment for the genre, is forcing players into circumstances where they are not readily confident in their ability to survive, led alone surpass with ease.
Summary
IGN and Gamespot are doing the Franchise, and the consumer audience a disservice with dishonest reviews, this game is a triple A production, for the few flaws that exist are completely out matched by dedication to a polished clean game that behaves exactly according to the rules of Survival Horror.
This is a game for Survival Horror fans, not Action and adventure.
When rating a game it is expected to review it based on its limitations, you don't blame an RPG for being long and dialogue oriented, you don't blame a Shooter for being frantic and relaint on reaction. Blaming the short comings of a game on it's dedication to abiding to the rules of its predetermined Genre, isn't a feasable criticism. It leads people such as myself to believe that the true motivations behind such one sided reviews are not at all related to the context of the Game, but something else entirely.
Well I'll finish it up tonight or tomorrow (I only play this at night), but to go from a 9 to a 5.9, does the game turn into crayola pictures with 5 year old voice overs?
Wouldn't of made sense since the game takes place only 15 years after Alien.
The ign/gamespot and poly reviews are terrible. The game is an easy 9 in my book. It's a bit too long and I wish the alien had more freedom to climb walls and showed up a bit less but other than that it's a great game.
yes, easily especially since the AI of the Alien will learn over time and each time it catches you in a certain spot (ie hiding in a locker) it will remember that and keep looking for those places or if you use the noise generator too often it will start to ignore it after a certain point
compared to the dumb AI in TEW the Alien is basically Einstein and Stephen Hawkings combined
and then theres the great combination of atmosphere and music, heavily inspired by the first Alien movie
If anyone is interested Aliens vs Predator 2000, is free over at GoG.com for the next 12 hours. Need to click on the front page, and sign up for a beta. Key arrives a few days later.
Finally beat it. God damn that game was much longer than expected. I'm glad I played on hard because the alien was a real threat. I've heard that it doesn't have the same presence on easier difficulties.
