I don’t intend this is a spoiler, but I’ll be curious if you guys still like the game as much when the alien shows up. The gameplay took a serious nosedive for me at that point and never quite recovered. :( I will say, however, the ending is worth reaching.
-TomThanks for the link correction, rei. I went back to something near the original FoV as it appears to work the best if that makes sense.
I haven’t reached the Alien yet, Tom, as I’m going real slow taking in all the sights. I swear they could release this as a Ridley Scott Alien museum software and I’d still buy it. CA just nailed the 70s Alien ship architecture and wall piece doodads. BTW, I’m very happy to see you gaming, Tom.
I only just started, but my first thought after leisurely strolling through the ship was that I wish there were more ships I could just experience like that because the atmosphere is fantastic.
I’m afraid actual danger later is going to make it harder to soak up all the beautiful details.
And yesterday night I had the first frustrating bit thanks to the checkpoint save system, because sometimes they are a bit sparse. I had to repeat an area four times. So uninteresting, each time was the same: go down stairs, rewire station, advance, go to right crouched, take loot, open a passage, turn back, crouch through a control rool, take more loot, use a computer, use another rewire station, open another door, advance a bit more, use something to distract the damn synth, advance, use elevator, (loading level… game doesn’t autosave here :(), then take some more loot, die to the alien around that part. Given that I only had problems with the last part, why did I have to repeat all the rest? At the end I could do it with eyes closed! I don’t have a feeling of mastering the game, it’s just a feeling of trite repetition. One more death and I would have lowered the difficulty to normal.
I’ve met the Alien, love the game to bits. But this is exactly the kind of gameplay I would love: stealthy, desperate, slow. This and Dark Souls 2 are neck and neck for GOTY so far.
The safe game structure is killing it for me slowly. I really do not have time to replay so much trite garbage. It’s always something at the end of 5-10 minutes of nothing exciting. And replaying boring bits is just bad. I really wish they would have saved more frequently or with a regular autosave every few minutes or something.
I don’t think it would be so bad if it actually was a good stealth game, but the combination of narrow corridors and unpredictable xenomorph behaviour just makes it incredibly tedious even if you don’t die.
My complaint is that for the few hours I played it, the campaign is pretty linear. There are littler detours with a room to loot or a secondary corridor here and there, or a vent, but mostly the structure of the levels are “long corridors” where different rooms and passages form the linear path your have to travel from the start of the level to the goal, with several side doors that always happen to be closed, or in low power, or stuck. I would prefer more a open hub structure, reminiscing of SS2.
The general consensus I’ve seen is that the game is a much better experience on Normal difficulty and that’s the best way to go.
In hard difficulty, btw, I haven’t been able to kill a synth, nor with the melee weapon or with the revolver. Combat in hard mode is a direct no go, which is kind of funny because then medikits lose their usefulness, which means crafting them also is a waste, instead of being valuable resources. If you get into combat, you are dead, so you reload, instead of maybe winning and then healing yourself.
Sooo… Overall, I didn’t like it. Loved the environment. Really appreciated the aesthetics. Sound design was top-notch.
Much like BioShock or System Shock, the Sevastopol has a great story to tell just in the spaces the player must traverse. The crumbling breakdown of the station, the desperate humans, the depressingly utilitarian synthetics. All of it was great. Then the Alien showed up and it all went downhill for me. I think there’s a major problem with an Alien horror game when the androids are more frightening and unsettling than the Alien. Beyond a couple of jump scares, I was more annoyed than scared when faced with it.
I’m not opposed to limited saves and manually forcing the player to go to a save point. I understand that it’s a good way to create tension in a horror game. I do think there needs to be a careful balance between OHMYGODPLEASEDON’TKILLME and FUCKYOUGAME. I really felt like most of my deaths fell into the latter category. A lot of it just seemed arbitrary and dumb.
Anyway, I give CA major props for doing their homework with regards to the Sevastopol and just the general 1980’s feel.
I play on hard and I’ve found medkits essential. There are plenty of things that can hurt you without killing you, and you need medkits to heal yourself up.
Thanks for the negative comments. I can put up with this for an all-time classic like Dark Souls 2. (It’s funny how much I turn into a foul-mouthed 13 year old Call of Duty player.) This game? I think I’ll check out the environment design on YouTube.
So I just searched YouTube for Alien Isolation. The very first result was fucking PewDiePie. Because apparently nothing goes better with survival horror than a screeching, mugging halfwit.
That’s how he got his start. It’s become an event at this point.
Personally I found the game got much more interesting at that point, though I can see how it will divide people. I’m only about 6 hours into the game though, and I know it’s a fairly long game so maybe my opinion will change later on. So far it has been a delight though, and I love how the alien behavior really upends a lot of my tried & true behaviors in stealth games and forces me to improvise in ways I didn’t use to.
Yes, this is where you use the Trespasser health system.
As far as the save system goes-
I am constantly running to the closest save point and checkpointing myself. For instance, I might delve out and complete one objective, then slink back to save point and save. If a new area opens up, the first time I usually run around like a mad man looking for the new save point. If I attract the alien or unwanted attention after finding it, I’ll reload my previous save knowing where the next is and approach it more carefully.
It’s extremely similar to Dark Souls. A constant pressure of risk/reward when going forward. I love it.
Hah that does sound like Dark Souls. Finding a new checkpoint was the best part because you got to use it as a hub for exploration. Getting to the next one? Not so much…
Yeah I can see the attraction in that, from a gameplay point of view, but to me quicksave is more immersive because it’s got more linear momentum and pertains to a single sense of self, with the save being a plain and obvious meta event (i.e. it’s not part of the story and doesn’t pretend to be). The entity who’s quicksaving, saving as they go along, etc., is not the character in the story, who is following a constant linear path from a, to b, to c (and the “insertion points” at saves are “invisible” to the character’s narrative).
Whereas with this system of saving where the saving is part of the narrative - ok, but who is this person that’s starting back a few rooms? Is it the same person that made the save then? What sort of self is “branching” like that?
In fact, it’s confused in a way, because the saving is still a meta event, for all that, it can’t avoid being what it is. Yet still, there’s this fiction of a “recording” of some sort in the game.
On the other hand, of course, quicksaving has the downside that from a gameplay point of view, you could be meta-ing yourself out of a suspenseful experience. If your thought stream has constant intrusions of “oh, this might be tricky, better hit quicksave here”, and stuff like that, it’s spoiling the experience. Needless to say, also you can “game” it.
I think the resolution to all these problems is just to have a rolling batch of autosaves, say half a dozen. Forget about saving altogether, just absorb yourself into the story until something goes tits up, but the autosaving just chugs along at a reasonable frequency, and you’re guaranteed to find an autosave that will pick you up far back enough. But you don’t have to think about it.