Aliens: Dark Descent

One of the most unique, thrilling, difficult and frustrating games I have played in this "double AA" mid-budget sphere for sure. Dark Descent is actually kind of the perfect blend of evolution and revolution I'm looking for from a game of this scope. The Alien license is used beautifully to propel the game's ideas of a squad-based RTS, an XCOM-style race against a doomsday clock, and adding an action-horror tint to it all, all of which also feeds into the game's crushing sense of difficulty. Your marines are slow, lumbering, and at level 1, terrible at marksmanship, so even one Xenomorph poses an incredible threat, and this game loves to throw hordes at you at regular intervals, both as story events and as emergent punishments for not being stealthy enough. Any one mistake in resource management, skill usage, base building, stealth or even choice of loadout can bite you in the ass, but as with, say, the Soulsborne games, it also makes victory feel like a defining moment when it's not a guarantee. While the game is a bit too long and threatens to get boring or tedious at times, it also has a remarkable sense of evolution; your marines' skills feel beefier as the game continues, but the Xenomorphs also become more plentiful in number and dangerous in size and scope, so you have to adapt your tactics as the game goes on, both within singular missions and across the whole campaign. And on the game's hardest settings, even the choice to save your game becomes a huge tactical risk when you cannot rotate saves, or choose when to save while managing your home base. Every choice you make in the long run must be perfect, and every short-term field sortie must be run over and over to minimise casualties or wastage. And that's a lot of really interesting decisions to be making in a schlocky Aliens game. In fact, while it doesn't come close to Isolation's level of terror, it does invoke a similar style of helpless survival horror tension.

The gameplay is only really marred by some repetition (backtracking and replaying singular runs is very common), some balance issues with certain classes and skills, and playing an RTS on a console is obviously a janky load of wank. Combined with the no-name developer making licensed Eurojank, expect a fair share of bugs and glitches, some of which are really annoying. In a game this long and hard, I'm going to be harder on shortcomings like this when they can cost you a run, and it happened to me in Dark Descent a few times too many. It also features some of the worst FMVs of this era, annoying repeating voice lines, a general lack of control and accessibility options for a game of this complexity, and what sounds like only two different music tracks when the action heats up. These are minor issues that only add up because it's a longer experience than your usual fare. Much bigger is the game's narrative, an attempt to expose the callous nature of expansionist corporation Weyland-Yutani and the destruction they wreak when they see just numbers and not the human cost, but accidentally falls back into tropes both schlocky and problematic, ultimately glorifying the mere existence of military force and not stopping to question the intersection between expansionist business interests and the armed defence forces that act on their behalf. If there is any sci-fi franchise that is usually good at this, it's Aliens, but alas, the second you meet human enemies, you're free to murder them with impunity, and even with some character arcs based on growing to value individual lives over the bigger picture, the marines accidentally (?) always get preferential treatment. All this just made me want to go back and watch Starship Troopers again to see someone do this storyline properly. And again, even this small issue adds up over a long game when the savory reward of a new cutscene with new plot points feels milquetoast at best and kind of gross at worst.

Still, the fact that I was glued to it for a week, pushing for its biggest accomplishments, says something about Dark Descent's level of originality, grit and especially its rewarding sense of challenge, sitting up there with some Soulsbornes for great examples of "tough but fair" gameplay loops. I never got into Darkest Dungeon because it felt too laborious and also strangely too manageable, stressful but not gratifying, and that wasn't a problem in Dark Descent. Its style is lacking, its substance a bit rough around the edges, but it's overall as unique and gratifying an experience I've had in quite some time...though when it comes to "doomsday clock" survival horror influenced games in 2023, the System Shock remake outsold.