![]() ![]() It’s a smart move and keeps you from having to corral lone marines who might otherwise wander off like wayward kittens, but does limit your ability to position personnel with any degree of accuracy. Your entire squad moves as a single, monolithic unit, with members (you’ll end up with gunners, medics, techs, recon marines and sergeants) stepping up to perform specific tasks like hacking doors or setting up sentry guns as and when required. Not that there’s as much to manage as you might think: the RTS interface has been streamlined for the console generation, making it easily playable with a controller but also dumbing down the tactical options slightly. While your marines will lay down fire as soon as they spot an enemy, your survival - and sanity - is maintained by the skill menu, which not only lets you to deploy special weapons and tactics like suppressing fire, flamethrowers and shotguns (for close encounters), but also slows time to a crawl, allowing you to micro-manage tactics without being completely overwhelmed by the xeno assault. While the game’s closest comparison is Firaxis’ X COM titles, Dark Descent opts for a real-time rather than turn-based format, allowing you to really feel the pressure as enemies descend, your motion tracker wailing desperate warnings. In-mission, though, Hayes is reduced to a voice on the radio as you guide a small squad of four marines through the gloom-shrouded corridors of colony buildings and, inevitably, the biomechanical hives of the aliens themselves. The game centres around Deputy Administrator Maeko Hayes, a Weyland-Yutani company woman who gets in way over her head when an alien outbreak leaves her and a ship full of Colonial Marines stranded on the planet Lethe. ![]() As your marines disembark from their ARC (a more compact ‘recon’ variant of the film’s APC) amidst howling wind and lashing rain to investigate the deserted colony of Dead Hills, it feels for all the world like you’re stepping directly into the USMC-issue boots of Vasquez, Hudson et al as they make their first, ill-fated incursion into Hadley’s Hope on LV-426 - even if the events here take place nearly two decades later. From the mid-eighties aesthetic of the computer interface, to slow-pans through the steel-panelled corridors of the USS Otago - complete with lumbering powerloaders - every detail of the game is lifted almost perfectly from the movie. It’s to the enormous credit of French developer Tindalos ( Battlefleet Gothic: Armada) then, that this curious blend of survival horror, turn-based tactics and real-time strategy does exactly that. While Alien: Isolation did a stand-up job of recreating Ridley Scott’s original film, and 2001’s Aliens vs Predator 2 made a decent fist of that franchise mash-up’s cross-species brawl, only decidedly average co-op shooter Aliens: Fireteam Elite has come even close to capturing the mood and feel of Cameron’s film. It’s one of the most intense sequences in James Cameron’s seminal sequel, but in Aliens: Dark Descent, this frighteningly regular occurrence is just another glorious day in the corps.Īliens has not had a storied history when it comes to video game adaptations. Cut off from escape and stripped of almost all their ammo, the surviving marines stage a desperate rearguard action, hoping against hope that the armoured personnel carrier can break through before they’re entirely overwhelmed. “Marines! We are leaving!” Michael Biehn’s Corporal Hicks had the right idea when, after straying into the heart of the xenomorph hive in 1986’s Aliens and losing half his platoon to snapping, translucent jaws, he bellows a retreat. Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X ![]()
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