DaRmaZat Alien Isolation was awarded with several prices back in 2014. That year though, I had played already too many survival games in a row, so I wasn’t interested straightaway, certainly not for the price tag of the game at that time. As the game went now on sale on Steam for only €1.85, I could not resist to figure out if it really is that good.
After having explored the spaceship, there is an impressive cut scene which immediately shows why the game did not steal its many awards. The controls are clear, the graphics (played on a 4K resolution with everything maxed out) look amazing for that time, and the sound builds the tension in a brilliant fashion. The puzzling is very challenging as well. So the immersion nears real perfection here, to answer my own question, yes, the game WAS that good in the beginning of my play time.
To have a first impression, check in the video below what happened after I restored the cut power in the Sevastopol space station (spoiler alert).
Though, as you could expect already, there is a BUT in my story here. And it is a big fat ugly “but”, unfortunately. Like a lot of other players mentioned earlier, Alien Isolation is often too punishing (insta-death when the alien finds you) and almost never rewarding, which introduces frustration of course.
The AI (whether alien, android or human) behaves very unpredictable and certainly cheats. At some point, I saw the alien searching for victims somewhere behind me, and 2 seconds later I see it is killing people miles ahead in front of me. The game is also way too long and the quests started to get very repetitive after 8 hours.
Next to these diseases, there is this old fashion save system too, where the player can only save his game at certain points in the story, so it’s not possible to save your game state manually whenever you want. In my opinion, this is even the game its biggest weakness, as it reduces every quest (which should be intriguing) into a hurried search for the next save point. As a result, after 12 hours of playing, I totally gave up as I did not really enjoy to spend hours playing the same quests over and over again, just to get to another next save point.
I can imagine the game is a perfect match for players who did enjoy other survival horror games like Outlast, Amnesia:The Dark Descent or Monstrum, but for me, the most rewarding of Alien Isolation was that I had only spent 1.85€ on it!
