Alien Isolation Review

“Working together for a safer, better connected Sevastopol”

I’m a big fan of horror survival games and I’m a big fan of Alien too, so an Alien horror survival game should be ideal for me right? Let’s talk about that.

In Alien Isolation you play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter 15 years after the events of the first movie. You get an opportunity to go to the ship Sevastopol and investigate your mother’s disappearance. And of course a Xenomorph is rocking about. Not only that but the synthetics are losing their shit and humans have turned on other humans for survival. You have to survive all these obstacles and deal with a lot of drama on the way to finding out the truth about your mother. There’s obviously a lot more to this games story than this but I don’t want to give much away. I really like the story, like in Alien it seems pretty simple but it becomes so much more and playing as Amanda, I got pretty invested in the story.

The main character Amanda played by Andrea Deck is pretty likable, a lot of that might just be because she’s Ellen’s daughter but I got pretty attached and now I do care about her. I also think Andrea Deck does a great job when trying to get fear across and she sounds generally scared, which helps you shit yourself, so thanks Andrea for making me cry. Not too much to say about the other characters, Axel is pretty fun and the others are all good but none of them really stand out as amazing characters.

This is a very effective horror survival game, after the scary music starts you might sit in a vent for like 5 minutes after the music has stopped just because you’re so scared to leave. You pretty much crawl around the station, avoiding the Xenomorph, Working Joes and actual humans. You can confront humans and Working Joes but stay the fuck away from the Alien. The game runs really well and gets so tense. It’s amazing that you sneak around a ship, avoiding things like the plague and the entire time you really enjoy it. There’s plenty crazy shit that happens to fuel your action drive but all the entertainment and fun comes for being careful and shitting yourself 24/7. Alien Isolation is so effective at scaring you, even when you shouldn’t be scared. It tricks you into thinking you’re never safe and I guess you never really are. The game is really pretty as well, I think it looks great and does an amazing job of capturing the original look and atmosphere of Alien.

Let’s go into detail about the Xenomorph. It’s had a little bit of a fix up, it no longer has the human like legs that you’d expect and it now walks around with legs much more reminiscent of the dog Xeno form Alien3. The Xeno also sports a super long tail. You might want to complain because this Xeno is still human based but has more animalistic additions but honestly, these new additions really make it scarier. Those legs help the Xenomorph tower over you and it gives the creature a very odd and scary posture when The bastard is walking about and creeping. The tail is great too, I have seen it glitch into objects and drag them around but normally the extended tail rolling around the place is really effective. The changes made to the Alien are very welcome.

In short Alien Isolation is a very attractive, nostalgic and terrifying horror survival that is so effective that Alien Colonial Marines doesn’t really bother me, why should I care when I have this glorious game to play. Alien Isolation is super scary, quite challenging and so effective that I welcome it with open arms into the Alien universe. Also the idea of a series of games that follows Amanda Ripley’s story really excites me.

Rating: *****

Better than > All previous Alien games Worse than > Bioshock

Main pros

-Amanda

-Scary as fuck

-Xenomorph

-Design

-Challenging

-Length

Main Cons

-Can get frustrating

-Like crazy fucking frustrating