Aliens: Dark Descent Review

If you’ve been around here on WellPlayed long enough you would know I adore anything science fiction. Sci-fi is my bread and butter and no property felt as impactful for fostering my love of the genre as Alien/Aliens. Ellen Ripley is just a badass and the Xenomorph has always been the coolest thing to me. So when Aliens: Dark Descent was first pitched to consumers I was incredibly intrigued. I’d regrettably missed out on the Aliens: Fireteam Elite train and the idea of a real-time tactics strategy game definitely piqued my interest. Some moderately egregious technical blemishes aside, Dark Descent delivers an incredibly tense, unique, and enjoyable experience, and is a must-play for genre lovers and H.R. Giger-inspired monstrosities alike.

Aliens: Dark Descent is something of a different beast from what I am used to. You initially assume control of Admiral Maeko Hayes aboard Pioneer Station, an orbital station above the planet Lethe. Something has gone awry with one of the cargo ships and the contents of one of the containers has been let loose. Things continue to go very wrong and a nearby light assault starship, the USS Otago, is shot down by missiles let loose from Pioneer. Maeko manages to make it off the station and rendezvous with the crash survivors residing in the damaged assault starship, and it’s time to start surviving the acid-blooded horrors that have been unleashed. Amongst this drama, you’ll immediately find that the dialogue is not particularly great, but that’s also a part of the charm. This game manages to effectively capture that cheesy, campy dialogue that is emblematic of the era in which this property earned its fame and success.

If you are going into Aliens: Dark Descent expecting an incredibly well-written story, then you will be sorely disappointed. This is not to say that average writing is detrimental to this game, in fact, it is the opposite. Anyone who is a fan of classic, pulpy sci-fi and such will actually be at home here. The characters are charmingly rigid, and the dialogue between the cast is entertainingly clunky. You’ll often find yourself chuckling at the writing and thinking “oh lord, did they really just say that?” and it’s in these moments where I personally found myself enjoying this game the most. In an era where games often try to reach an impossibly high standard and then take the wind out of you when they fall short, it’s incredibly heartening to play a game that is fully aware of its IP’s identity and completely leans into the lesser refined tropes that helped define it.

For all intents and purposes, Aliens: Dark Descent borrows a lot of inspiration from the XCOM series. Tindalos Interactive clearly understood the assignment of making a tactics-strategy game but has also made sure there is a much bigger emphasis on preparation and choice. Rather than planning each move one turn at a time, you instead have to try and make your best estimation as to how an encounter will play out. This is due to the removal of the turn-based combat system and instead opting for a real-time combat system. This seemingly simple change actually impacts the way you play a whole lot. In a turn-based system, a mistake can be quite easily remedied as the game is affording you the time to think of a solution in order to achieve the best outcome possible. In Dark Descent, no such time is afforded to you. You need to react quickly and so the game quite frequently tests your situational awareness and adaptability.

With these changes comes a stark increase in difficulty. I’ll be the first to admit that, despite my love for the genre, I’m pretty bad at these types of games. I may not be the sharpest egg in the attic when it comes to these strategy games, but I love them nonetheless. Even being accustomed to the punishment, I definitely felt the bump in difficulty with this game. It’s not that this game is specifically hard, it’s more that it is far more unforgiving that the games that I am used to in the genre. I really felt when I had screwed the pooch and suffered the consequences, but I also loved every minute of it.

The way Tindalos Interactive has integrated the brutal nature of the iconic Xenomorphs is great. You come up against all different ranks of these extraterrestrials, ranging from the Facehuggers who begin the life cycle of these creatures, all the way to Mothers. Each alien t variant presents its own unique challenges, and it is up to you to build a squad that can handle whatever may come your way. The squad mental health management has its own set of challenges too but in a good way. Xenomorphs are terrifying and this could not be more true than with the way encounters with these creatures leave a mark on the individuals fighting them. Within missions, your marines will become stressed and you’ll need to manage these stress levels. Whether it be pulling the squad out of the area and coming back to fight another day, or by hunkering down in shelters where the doors have been temporarily sealed, be sure to do whatever you can to bring your marines’ stress levels down. Allowing stress to accumulate and develop into higher levels can cause all sorts of problems, including a loss of weapon accuracy, which can prove to be incredibly detrimental in the heat of battle.

Alongside stress, your marines can be left with lasting trauma that needs to be treated further down the line, lest you risk a variety of complications, from starting a mission with more stress to even preventing shelters from reducing stress levels. But this is not a zero-sum game; you can unlock avenues for treating these traumas, as traumas only reveal themselves when certain levels of stress have been reached in the previous mission – being clever enough with your squad management can make this mechanic effectively a non-issue. There are, of course, other mechanics that are normally found within the tactics-strategy genre. This includes lasting physical damage that needs to be remedied, character traits and flaws, and of course, the deaths of squad members being a permanent affair.

To make things even more tense the game scales the difficulty of each deployment based on alertness from the enemy. If you manage to avoid encounters as much as possible, things should be pretty manageable. Being discovered too often by the Xenos will not only cause them to hunt you down, but will also cause large swarms to appear in the hopes of overwhelming your squad. If this happens it is imperative that you find a spot from where you can reliably defend yourself. If the time that you are being hunted goes on for too long then the difficulty of the deployment actually increases, similar to how Risk of Rain 2 scales its difficulty based on time elapsed. The main difference here being that instead of it being a timer that is constantly going up, it only increases when actively engaged in combat. This is another reason to learn when to pull out of a deployment and come back later, as allowing this to get too high will surely spell your squad’s demise and no one wants to spend the resources investing in your characters only to lose them because you stayed longer than you should have.

With all this in mind, I had one minor issue and one crippling issue while playing this game. I decided to play this game on my Steam Deck and it was here where the cumbersome and unintuitive nature of the menus and UI became apparent. There were a lot of points where I’d bring up a menu and end up pressing the wrong button to navigate because the game tends to go back and forth on whether it wishes to use the shoulder buttons to tab across options or the analog stick. This was the minor issue. The major issue was that, especially prior to the release of the game, I could barely play for an hour before the game would crash. The first time I encountered this issue was surprisingly beneficial as I had just lost my entire squad, but as the fail condition was about to occur the game crashed, effectively meaning that nothing had happened (I swear I can play games, I’m not one of those game journalists). This was the only time that it wasn’t frustrating, as every other time was just met with me losing progress or deciding that was all I was going to play for that session. This situation did improve quite a bit post-release, but if you are playing on the Steam Deck be wary of this issue occurring from time to time. The game also ran decently on the Steam Deck, usually sitting around 45–50fps but dipping down to 30fps in some busier scenes. Normally this would be a problem, but given that the Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device I wasn’t too fixated on maintaining a super high framerate. The inclusion of technologies like AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) will also help you squeeze just that little bit more out of the visuals, and all in all they look quite pleasing on the compact device.

Final Thoughts

Aliens: Dark Descent is an incredibly unique, gripping, and tense experience. It takes the best elements of the main genres from which it borrows inspiration while also maintaining the authenticity of the experience in regard to the IP it is adapting. The writing is delightfully lame and campy, the mechanics are incredibly tight, and the atmosphere oozes with tension. You may not play as Ellen Ripley, but this is still very much a fantastic Aliens experience.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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