Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a first person survival horror game based off of the Alien franchise. You play as the now adult daughter of the movie franchise's main character, Ripley. You investigate a derelict space station, Sevastopol looking for the black box data of the Nostromo mining vessel which her mother of course destroyed and fled in the first movie attempting to escape the alien scourge which has now infested the very same station you are trapped on. So in the timeline this should be between Alien and Aliens while Ripley is still in stasis in the escape shuttle.

In case you're wondering how I feel about the Alien franchise going into this game, I've read the original book, I own the original movie trilogy and the AVPs (if you care about that,) I have a Nostromo T-shirt and my dog's name is Ripley. I've never played an Alien video game… and still haven't seen Covenant.

Isolation is heavy on sneaking and hiding. You hack computers, cut through metal hatches, force open doors and generally go places you're not supposed to go to do things you're not supposed to do. The alien is definitely not the only threat you have to worry about on your way.

There’s a long build up of quiet and isolation up to your first encounter with enemies. Four armed humans appear in a big room searching for me which is a bit excessive when all I have is a wrench. When I heard them coming I fled the room. I soon discovered that there was no way I could reenter and do whatever undetected to pick them off, (assuming that’s even possible to do.) There are utility panels in a lot of places in the game where you can turn on or off local utilities like air filtration, lights, sprinklers, loudspeakers, etc. Honestly I’m mystified as to how most of this shit can help me if it does. I only ever used them to open doors and turn off security cameras which is pretty straight forward. In this room I can shut off air filtration which will make the air cloudy which I’m going to guess will make me harder to detect. The problem is that there are no boxes anywhere near where I am and it’s not possible to reach one undetected. I had no distraction items in my inventory so I just sat and thought and sat and thought. I couldn’t even pull the enemies from the room and get them to chase me. Eventually I just turned the game off. When I came back The four people had spawned outside of their room just right there around the corner from the save point. They came at me in a conga line and I just killed them one by one with the wrench as they emerged save for the last one. What was that all about? A glitch or did the game just realize I was up shit creek without a paddle and gave me a leg up?

After that I had an encounter with the xenomorph it was short and uneventful. It was like an introduction more than anything.

The next area was my first real serviceable stealth test. The area is populated with numerous ‘Working Joes’ as they are called in the game. These are low grade maintenance androids kind of like a simple prototype of Ash from the movie(s). They certainly couldn't pass for human though. They look like demon possessed store mannequins and are one of the freakiest video game enemies I’ve ever seen. Their uncanny valley appearance combined with glowing eyes and an emotionless reprimanding of you for making them waste company time while they search for you so they can beat you to death just for being in a restricted area is effectively terrifying. They're stronger and more resilient than humans but slower. I think the best part about this is that once you get attacked by one of these you don't trust any of them for the rest of the game which now that I think of it mirror's Ripley's fear of the synthetic in Aliens that looks like Ash, (the android that basically got everyone killed.) I did pretty well overall on this part.

 It wasn’t until the second encounter with the alien that I really hit the learning curve brick wall. The alien comes out of a vent after you get a password off of the computer. Your objective is to find a specific ID card in the medical facility you’re in and then get out. If the alien catches you, you die. It’s invulnerable to weapons, is really perceptive in sight and sound and also runs faster than you which means remaining undetected at all times is pretty much imperative to success. You’d think you could just sneak out of the room and go somewhere else and your chances of encountering it would be lower. NO. Similar to the rubber band AI in a racing game which magically keeps you from getting too far ahead of the computer players, you will never be reasonably distanced from the alien. Even though it doesn’t sense you it’s always going to be meandering around within 15 yards of your location at all times. (At least in this place.) Forget looking for the fucking ID. You barely have enough of a window to pop out of one locker and into another a few steps down the hall before your motion detector shows a dire proximity to the alien again. Obviously you have to enter a hiding space before it sees you or you’re fucked. Sometimes it will investigate your hiding spot. The first time this happened a ‘hold breath’ prompt came up which I missed and then died. The second time it happened I passed the prompt but then a second prompt came up for ‘lean back’ which I failed and then died. It gives you like half a second to react. What a fussy bitch. The time after that the alien just went straight to ripping open the locker and killing me with no prompts. It hadn’t seen me or even entered the room yet. Yes, by my assessment it seemed to spontaneously appear in the room after I hid for the sole purpose of killing me. What the fuck? Have fucking mercy. This is ridiculous. It’s like trying to hide from God. I keep wondering if there’s more than one of them or if it can teleport because it's just always where you are. You can leave it behind in one room and run straight into it in the next as it exits a ceiling vent in front of you. I tried messing around with a utility box I found in a pretty dark and obscure little nook. I got impaled from behind with my back against the wall. How did it find me? If I can’t successfully interact with THIS without dying then what the fuck can I interact with? How is the alien coming out of a solid wall behind me? I can’t walk around. I can’t stop to pick up or read things. Hiding works about half the time. How am I supposed to accomplish anything? Some of the automatic doors just plain take forever to let you in too. Is there even any excuse for this other than to be a pain in the ass and potentially deadly? This is simple technology in supposedly the distant future. It would be impossible to find an automatic door in present day that comes even close to opening this fucking slow. Yeah it's probably just loading the area beyond the door but it's still bullshit.

I got into a discussion with a GameStop employee who asked me how I felt about Isolation. I told him, “It's kind of a pain in the ass.” He told me he never finished it and it's on his backlog now. And he said that the alien learns from what you do and adapts. When I look at the trophy stats for the game it shows that only 28% of players complete the game, (get the final chapter trophy.) The game is a legit pain in the ass but I did get better.

I’ve never failed this abysmally hard at sneaking or at a video game in general since LAX in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which was one of the very rare occasions I abandoned a game and it was at the very end. I spent one entire gaming session just dying in Alien: Isolation like 20 times. I accomplished nothing except learning how to run and hide and what places were pointless to visit in the obnoxiously large area. Now that I know you can lean back while hiding I do it automatically. When I turned the game back on the next night I died twice in quick succession but then found the ID and escaped. I thought that was the end of that encounter but no. It's still skulking around for the rest of the chapter. The chapter finale gets pretty ridiculous. You're supposed to get to the elevator and leave the area but you have to run a gauntlet where not only the alien is lurking but men with guns who are looking for you. You don't even have to deal with the men. Just hide somewhere, count to twenty and they’re probably all dead because the same improbably cruel criteria for staying alive also applies to your human foes. (Combat and running is to the alien what premarital sex is to a murderer in a slasher movie. You do it around them, you're dead.) Suddenly they added vent openings in the ceiling that are instant death by alien if you just walk under them. They don't even show up on your detector. So you have to navigate through this dark area watching everything from the monitor in your hand to the hall in front of you to the fucking ceiling, stopping to scrutinize every single overhead square shape you see in the strobing emergency lights.

Eventually you get a flamethrower, (I like that they touched on all the equipment from the first movie: shock sticks, flamethrower, motion tracker.) The flamethrower is your ace in the hole for when the alien finds you. When previously all you could really do is scream, “Not in the face!” now you can hose that bitch down with napalm to drive it off, (or more like a couple of very frugal fireball button taps.) This could constitute an indefinite fix for continuing your mission for a while or the alien could come right back seconds later for round two. It's a crap shoot.


 Making progress in this game is often grueling. You move slow and quietly punctuated by long periods of hiding and then maybe you get killed and do it again. A lot of times the alien just won't go the hell away so you can move on. It has this tendency to just camp out near your objective. You might see it close on the detector or come in the room so you hide in or behind something and wait for it to fuck off but it doesn't. It's pacing around the room like it knows you're there and is just trying to wait you out. Sometimes it'll just go stand in the doorway. The worst is when it leaves and then comes right back in like it's going “Ah-ha!” It can do this for forever. Once after accomplishing a significant amount of tasks I decided to backtrack to a save point. On my way I had three or four encounters with the alien where I had to hit it with fire and two times where I had to hide. When I finally made it to the save point the alien came out of a ceiling vent and I had to drive it off with fire. It retreated to the vent only to come out seconds later. This time I hid behind a big column and we played ring around the rosie for like two minutes while I used the motion tracker to see which way it was moving so I could stay out of sight. I JUST WANT TO SAVE AND GO TO BED! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?


The game has a crafting system. You can collect parts and blueprints which allow you to create about half a dozen different gizmos. You can actually make a medkit. The rest are distraction, disabling or lethal depending who you use them on. They can all be thrown or planted so that they're triggered by proximity. The only ones I ever really used are the EMP device which momentarily disables uninsulated androids and the Molotov which can be used to scare the alien in a pinch if you're out or want to conserve flamethrower fuel because it depletes quickly and the more you use it the more resistance the alien builds to it. Everything else I may have used successfully once. Those noisemakers don't seem to draw enemies far enough away from me to actually accomplish anything.

The loading screen gives you tips at the bottom which is nice because it takes like a fucking hour to load the game. One of the tips is to listen to dialogue of survivors before approaching to assess if they're a threat. This is bullshit. You will never definitively know from listening to them if they'll try to kill you once you make yourself known to them because they're never going to say something as contrived as, “GRRRR, I'm going to shoot the first person I see,” or “Gee, I hope more survivors show up. I love new friends.” when I come across ANYONE or ANYTHING I automatically assume they're a threat. I've spent inordinate amounts of time listening and sneaking around people who ended up being indifferent to my presence. I've barged into rooms I thought were safe and gotten shot at. That time I tentatively entered a big occupied lobby finally realizing it was safe only to come back minutes later and get shot at. What is up with that shit? It makes no sense. Are these bad people that ousted the good people while I was out? Are they the same people but got angry at me for some mysterious reason? Why would I assume to recheck a room I'd already established as safe especially when I'm running from the alien and have my nose buried in the motion tracker. I can only really figure out the working Joes since realizing that their eyes are only red when dangerous.

The sound design in Isolation is top notch. In fact I think it won an award for it but I can't remember where I saw that. Suffice it to say that every sound made me feel like I was about to die which is great for a horror game.

 I like how well the game sticks to the retro futurist technology of the 1979 movie. You have a lot of monochromatic green computer screens and I love the big data chip you insert every time you use a save terminal. You get to talk to the main computer via keyboard just like Mother. You get to suit up in the bulky ribbed space suits with mounted lights. You even get to play a flashback where you enter the original derelict, (after the Nostromo team,) and see the Space Jockey. You see the adult xenomorph(s) plenty. You see eggs hatch. You see facehuggers hatching, crawling and attached. You see bodies cocooned on the walls. But strangely you never see a chestburster scene which is probably the most iconic thing about Alien. Even if you've never seen Alien you probably know about this scene. It's just something that's enshrined in pop culture. Hell, within it's genre it's arguably the most horrific thing in a horror movie. You get choked and faceraped by a giant spider, unknowingly incubate its egg and then an alien explodes out of your chest. Why would the game not use this?

 
This game really drags on. You just go from one issue or one foiled scheme to the next. It finally ended at about the seventh or eighth time I thought it was ending. There is bad luck and then there is moving the goalposts. When you're seconds from evacuating after getting the run-around for the last four hours and then get snatched away and cocooned in a mysterious location with the mission being go back to where you just were THAT'S MOVING THE FUCKING GOALPOSTS.

This game will definitely piss you off. Just when you think you've seen everything and have it figured out it throws you a curveball. You might not enjoy the game's cruel nature of kicking you in the dick, in fact I'm sure that's why so few finished it, but in the end the experience is at least undeniably very Alien.

Turok: Evolution

Oh, it's been so long since I played a game worth writing about. Feels good. Turok: Evolution is the 2002 prequel… I guess to the first Turok game? I played that game a little a long time ago until I got lost and didn’t know what to do so I don’t really know how I feel about Turok games going in other than I like the idea of shooting dinosaurs. Evolution has that weird mix of sci-fi and fantasy with dinosaurs you get from Dinosaur Planet or rather Starfox: Adventures. Look at that cover. I mean REALLY look at it. Eew. Is that torn skin in the bottom teeth? WTF? Can they do that? I remember when I bought the Andrew W. K. album ‘I Get Wet’ on CD. The wrapper had a black bar covering Andrew’s bloody nose.

This is a well established franchise. You know what to expect. It’s an FPS where you play as a Native American man who’s been flung into… the distant future... past. Something, something, kill dinosaur people. You know, how exactly DOES all this work? How are there humans, birds, monkeys, regular dinosaurs and anthropomorphic dinosaurs with alien technology all in one time and place? Did they ALL time travel or is this an alternate dimension? It's kind of weird. This is like the island from Swiss Family Robinson or Lost.

The game controls are default inverted for look up and down which is egregiously wrong so I turn it off and also bump up the sensitivity on both axis so I can turn quicker. When I turn off the game and come back later the settings have reverted to their default positions. It doesn't save the settings. Every time I turn the game back on I first have to re-enter the settings again. (That’s not redundant if it’s the third time it’s happened) It's not even that quick of a fix either. It's three screens deep in the pause menu. It's a small thing but it's incredibly annoying.

The game uses the traditional med pack health system. The levels have no checkpoints and only save after you’ve completed them so some of these levels you’re going to get REALLY familiar with. The game also has cheat codes. I didn't try any but definitely thought about it after restarting a level for the dozenth time.

Aside from the typical FPS gameplay there are also many TPS flying segments. (Actually they can also be FPS if you like that camera angle.) Holy shit do I hate these flying segments more than anything. You are supposed to fly a weapon enabled pteranodon or… Quetzal...coatlus… Is that a thing? Anyway, you fly through these horribly cluttered jungles, caves and canyons populated with enemies and obstacles, some of which break or fall, and you are not allowed to touch anything. (Imagine the Death Star trench and the Death Star interior are combined.) If you touch something, you die and start over. You don't even have to smash straight into it. You can graze the side of a canyon wall and it kills you instantly. Sometimes you'll get lucky and deflect, taking damage but that's pretty rare. Easily the biggest challenge here is not the enemies but never hitting anything. Going back to Starfox, imagine playing Starfox where you're not allowed to hit anything with your Arwing or you die and start the level over. And on a weird side note I just realized you fly a LOT more in this Turok game than you did in Starfox: Adventures... and the flying is even better integrated into the game. Your flying weapons do jack shit. You have infinite .50 cal rounds which you can upgrade for a few seconds with a pickup. Rockets are the only thing that reliably kills stuff with any sort of efficiency but you can only carry 20 and have to stock them with pickups. Every chapter that involves flying inevitably brings you to a part where you have to destroy something big which requires you to blow up several moving and/or partially concealed weak points. You're surrounded by enemies shooting at you from all directions in close quarters. Your turning radius is the size of a soccer field. So to recap, survive or destroy dozens of enemies shooting at you. Blow up the weak points by flying to the outer perimeter wall of the level and turning around for a three seconds or less approach to hopefully line up a shot and thread the needle to score like one hit out of probably 15-20 necessary hits before pulling a hard evasive turn because remember DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING or you're starting over.

The game does this stupid thing where you lose your weapons. Not like you get captured and they get taken away but you start the next level and some of them will just have vanished from your arsenal. I'm aware you can't switch to a gun that you have no ammo for even if you have the gun but that's not what the problem is. I haven't been able to use the bow since probably the start of chapter three. I KNOW I have it. It's one of the two weapons you start out with for fuck sake. I've never run out of ammo for it. I still see arrow quivers lying around EVERYWHERE later in the game and when I walk over them I can't pick them up but it says “Need bow” as if I don't have it. Why don't I have it? Where did it go? This has happened with other weapons that I knew I owned and had ammo for like the flechette gun and rocket launcher. They just seem to come and go as they please between levels except for that damn bow and the pistol both of which I never saw again. And without the pistol I can't even snipe and that really cripples you strategically. This is such a pain in the ass when you get in a tight spot and your arsenal has been randomized and downsized leaving you with less ammo and possibly some very inflexible weapon combos. I never even had a tek bow until the end of the game for like one level and then it vanished. Oh and also the flamethrower showed up again briefly after being absent for like 80% of the game. On another note, my secondary fire on my launcher doesn't work even though I can see the ammo number and the loaded ammo in the launcher. This whole thing blows.

There is no shortage of total bullshit moments in this game whether they come by chance or by design. You can fall through the gap between the platform and cable gondola and die in two levels even though the gap isn’t physically big enough to fall through. So mind the gap and jump like an asshole while entering and exiting gondolas. There’s a part in the city assault where you come across a sleg at a mounted machine gun. If you look at him, you die instantly. That’s not an exaggeration. It doesn’t even matter if you have full health. You die before you can even attack or maybe even see him. Those guns are powerful but they aren’t the finger of God so I don’t know why it’s like this. It’s completely unreasonable. I got past this part by crouching behind a pile of rubble and lobbing grenades blindly in the general direction of the gun. I got lucky I guess because he’s far away and grenades suck. There’s a level where you have to hunt down 10 snipers to make it through a bombed out city block. You’re supposed to stay in the buildings and out of the streets because you’ll get shot supposedly by snipers but it doesn’t matter if there is just one sniper left and they have no visual of you and you are running. You get “shot” and take damage if you step into the street. LAZY. You’re not actually getting attacked by an enemy. You’re getting magically penalized for not following the mission parameters. There are times where you are deep in the jungle and can't see anything because the foliage is so thick. One level in particular that I remember made you collect three keys to open a gate to advance. The area had the triple threat of low visibility, traps and raptors. Even if you could see, most of the traps are undetectable because they drop down from the jungle canopy which is too high to see and there's no evidence on the ground. All you get is a sound and one second to move your ass. The keys are in pretty difficult/obscure places. The first is atop a natural log bridge. I’m pretty sure I never found the actual way you’re supposed to get up there because it wasn’t at all apparent. I instead fluked my way jumping up on the low end of the log very particularly like a game tester trying to break the game. The second key requires you to fall off a deadly cliff and land on a super fucking tiny platform. It’s so small you have to be as close to the edge without falling off to be able to see and line up with it.

Platforming it such a bitch. You shouldn't have to do it in this game but there are definitely segment that require finesse. The biggest problem is that when running to jump from the edge of one thing to another you always reach the edge sooner than you think you should and just fall off because you jump too late. This is compounded by the fact that you don’t jump very well so you want to try for those extra inches.

The ladders in this game are garbage. You can never just walk into them and climb. You can't get on until you've satisfied whatever finicky angle or altitude required for engaging the climbing mode. Then when you do grab on you're probably situated on it poorly and just fall off again halfway up. When you're climbing a ladder you are forced to look straight up which becomes an issue when you get to the top because any enemies you're exposed to up there get to take pot shots at you while you get off the ladder and reorient the camera. Its natural or at least believable that people glance up when climbing a ladder but they're not going to keep looking up until they're standing on the top rung. That's ridiculous. Also it's easy to just fall straight back down when transitioning back from climbing to walking and it takes VERY LITTLE height to injure or even kill you.

The levels get more obnoxious and less interesting in setting as the game progresses. Jungle? Good. Mountain? Good. Cave? Good. Ruins? Good. Temple? Good. Rural Outpost? Good. Desert? Okay I guess. Urban combat? Fuck that shit. You can get that anywhere. I didn't pick this up to play a shitty CoD clone. I want to be Rambo in the jungle and killing dinosaurs. That’s your thing. Let’s do that. Past the game’s halfway point I don't even see plants or wild dinosaurs anymore. Booooooooooring.

That big setting change to urban/industrial interior and the random weapons are what really killed the joy for me. I’m a masochist or maybe I just really hate to quit any video game or show i start until the bitter end no matter how awful it is. This game is definitely hit and miss and I don’t think most people are willing to stick with Evolution through the misses for an overall meh.