Alien: Isolation Trailer

Zach Goodier

Alright, so I have a new trailer to review.  And while I normally don't go too deep into trailers, after the whole Colonial Marines issue, I wanted to discuss some of my hopes for this game, and my opinions on how this could turn out.

First off, I love the new direction.  While I still would love to play a good shooter as a colonial marine, I feel like it would be tricky to capture the feel of the second movie.  For instance, ammo was very tight in the movie, and most games give you more than enough to run in guns blazing.  This really ruins the sense of being trapped with hardly enough to defend yourself.  Resources need to be scarce, so that a marine would have to be forced to conserve ammo and decide between fight and flight, whether to engage enemies that threaten their survival, or fall back/hide to avoid confrontation when possible.  But these are issues for another game, sense this one doesn't seem to have any weapons at all, taking after the first movie and not the second.  You will not be fighting, and there is only the one alien, but you can't just flee, either, since the Xeno will hear you and immediately chase you down.

This is where the intriguing part of the game begins: you are prey, only.  The other games focused on letting you fight back, having a changing dynamic between hunter and hunted, but this game doesn't give you the option. 

The issue then becomes keeping the player from getting bored, or giving them incentive to even think of traveling through the shadows, if they have no way of defending themselves from the monster in the dark.  Well, you need to complete objectives to survive, whether it be repairing the ship, gathering resources to survive, or whatever you'll have to do.  And to keep the levels from feeling boring, the alien has its own AI, which uses sight, smell, and sound to always approximate where the player is, and hunt the player.  This is what makes the game both exciting, and scary as all hell in the darkest depths of space.  This thing is always hunting the player, and every little creak, sneeze, fart, or wrong step could bring this alien down on you like Thor's barb-tailed hammer.  Your only option is to play it smart, weigh your options, wait for your chance to move forward, and know that it will never be safe.

You will be playing the daughter of Ellen Ripley, who was briefly mentioned in the second movie as already deceased.  This game takes place 15 years after the events of the first movie, so this could be a neat transition between the first and second films.

I'm hoping this game turns out as advertised.  While I don't look forward to wetting myself under a table staring into the two sets of teeth before I shake loose this mortal coil, this could be the beginning of a new wave of successful Alien(s) games.  This franchise isn't made for shooters, but for survival.  Even in the second film, survival was the main theme, and even though the characters had weapons, they weren't going to be enough to protect themselves from the Xenomorph horde.  If this game is successful, I believe it could be a sign to producers to focus more on capturing this feeling, and making the game less about jump scares followed by a shooting gallery, and making it more like being a mouse with a slingshot looking up at a branch covered in owls.  This is something that Alien games have been missing, and I hope this return to horror will get the ball rolling for future games.