Yesterday, Aliens: Fireteam was announced with a release date aimed at this summer. Set in the Xenomorph Alien universe, Fireteam is a Left 4 Dead-like where you and three other players rally together to defeat rampaging hordes of zombies… no, wait that’s not right… oh yes, hordes of rampaging Xenomorphs. So, completely different to Left 4 Dead then. I suppose it’s good news for Alien fans that there’s a new game coming out, ditto Left 4 Dead players wanting something a bit more fresh, and it looks decent enough, but it just leaves me wondering: did I imagine Alien: Isolation or what?
Assuming I didn’t imagine it, Alien: Isolation is a survival horror game released in 2014. In it, you play as Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda Ripley, as she makes her way around a damaged spacecraft while trying to avoid the relentless Xenomorph stalking you down corridors. Initially, you are unarmed and defenceless, though as the game goes on you pick up a tracking device to keep tabs on the beast and a flamethrower to help scare it off. Even with that though, you cannot defeat the Xenomorph, you can only escape. Isolation borrowed heavily from Alien, the original movie in the series, in that it was much more slow and tense. There might be horrors lurking around every corner, and even when it wasn’t, that just made you more terrified for when the monster would eventually emerge from the shadows – especially when you can hear it scurrying through the vents.
Fireteam – and most other Alien properties – take inspiration from the sequel, Aliens, moving the franchise into a more action-oriented bullet fest. That has its place, but we have a lot of that stuff in games, and I wish we had more room for the lower octane chills Alien: Isolation brought, especially since it matched them with the iconic ‘70s lo-fi futurism decor of the first Alien movie; another thing that future sequels threw out of the airlock.
It’s not just that it was cool and paid homage to Alien: it’s bloody good as well. The sense of survival is palpable, with all of your toolkit designed for flight, not fight. If you ever go toe to toe with the beast, you die. The manual save stations are in short supply too, only accessible at telephone points. Typically, I’m not a fan of games that don’t let me save and get back to my real life whenever I damn well feel like it – looking at you, Persona 5 – but with Alien: Isolation, it worked, because it had a thematic, narrative reason, and knowing you couldn’t just save and quit made everything more tense, twisting up the stakes ever further.
The best part about the game though is the way the Xenomorph itself works. It features a dual AI system, and the developers were keenly aware that the main role of the Alien is to scare you. If it catches you, you’re dead and you start over. There’s no climactic battle, no slick attack cinematics that activate while you scramble away; you either run or you get your brain tongued out. The devs knew then that the best way to use the Xenomorph was not to attack you, but to make you think you were being attacked.
The first part of this dual AI is known as Director AI – a feature which, funnily enough, was first used in Left 4 Dead. This detects how much pressure the player is currently under, by measuring the tasks being completed and the player’s distance from various things in the game; the most important being the Xenomorph itself. At incredibly high stress, Director AI will actually tell the Xenomorph to back off, meaning this stress is maintained and allowed to fade, rather than reaching an apex as you are attacked. However, if the player is at low stress, the Director AI moves the Xenomorph closer to quickly crank up the stress levels. In Left 4 Dead, this AI was used to measure when would be a good time for the game to add more zombies, and when it was best to leave you to it.
Alien: Isolation’s second AI was called Alien AI, and as you might expect, is essentially the brain of the Xenomorph. In this AI, there are around 100 different interactions, from basic ones such as walking, running, or pausing, to more complex ones like jumping into vents, opening lockers, and crouching to peer under desks. But the thing is, the Alien AI is not fully loaded at the start of the game. Initially, only the most basic actions can be performed, meaning if you hide in a locker near the start, it won’t think to look for you. However, later on, it learns. Lockers are no longer safe, and once you’ve used a hiding place once, it will understand that it should check there. The Xenomorph reacts to your playthrough, meaning it learns your behaviour in order to hunt you. That’s you, specifically, not just the average player. It reacts to whatever you teach it. It knows you better than you know yourself, and it’s here to kill you.
However, Alien: Isolation – if it existed, which it might not have – did not sell all that well. Survival horror games often struggle in this department, as they’re part of a genre many players avoid. It also had a weird Kinect integration that, like every integration with Microsoft’s daft camera, was rubbish. As a result of this and the dismal performance of the unrelated-aside-from-being-an-Alien-game Alien: Colonial Marines, we never got a sequel. With Fireteam (and subsequent films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) proving the series can still be relied upon though, it’s baffling that we’ve never even heard rumors of anything happening with Isolation. All those clever ideas seemingly abandoned. Even with lower than expected sales, you’d hope the name brand recognition, the innovation, and the foresight to not waste money on Kinect stuff this time around would be worthy of at least one more swing, but I guess not.
Mostly though, when I look at this new Alien game, I think it’s just boring being stronger than everyone. Especially Xenomorphs, which are supposed to be relentless, near invulnerable killing machines. I’m sure you’ll all have fun playing Fireteam, but I’ll be the one in the corner, telling you that blasting down three of them with a shotgun isn’t canonically accurate to the first movie. Just me, wearing my fedora, still wondering if Alien: Isolation was just a dream I had.
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Stacey Henley is an editor for TheGamer, and can often be found journeying to the edge of the Earth, but only in video games. Find her on Twitter @FiveTacey
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