Aliens Dark Descent Review – Damn Good Game

Aliens Dark Descent offers an all-new take on the Alien franchise, but is it everything we expect from an Aliens Game? Back in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, we had ‘Aliens vs Predator’, a great game that captured the unnerving horror and suspense of ‘Alien’ while mixing it with the action and thrills of the ‘Predator’ series.

I don’t really need to go into what was next as we all know about one of gaming’s biggest marketing blunders with ‘Aliens: Colonial Marines’. A game that showed so much promise with the initial trailer to then be a cataclysmic disaster once released. And let’s not forget the buggy A.I. that was the result of a typo in the code.

It was a bleak few years that followed with no prospect of any good ‘Alien’ games on the horizon.

All that changed with ‘Alien: Isolation’. A game so good it’s now rooted in the main canon along with the Audible Original Drama series. It was a game that kept your heart racing with its intelligent A.I. Xenomorph, its creepy sound design, and the atmospheric and moody lighting.

For a game released way back in 2014, I’m still making my way through it as I’m too on edge to play for more than 30 mins ago.

It wasn’t until 2021 that we got our next ‘Alien’ game with ‘Aliens: Fireteam Elite’. A game that’s very much inspired by the ‘Left 4 Dead’ formula, ‘Fireteam’ would lead you and your friends through different campaigns with waves and waves of the Xenomorph horde for you to slaughter. It was an alright game, to say the least. Not one to really play by yourself. It’s much more enjoyable and easy playing through with a friend. On the upside, they also released the ‘Pathogen’ expansion which connects the game to both ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Alien: Covenant’.

So after all of that, what was next for the franchise?

We’ve already had a first-person shooter, a first-person survival horror and a third-person multiplayer horde game.

So what was next?

To quote Monty Python, “And now for something completely different”

‘Aliens Dark Descent’ is a Real Time Strategy game with real-time squad management. A similar game to compare it to would be the Xcom series.

However ‘Aliens Dark Descent’ is on a who other level.

It has a good blend of allowing the player time to think and plan out how they want to move their squad and how to approach an encounter while mixing it with that looming suspense and horror of the ‘Alien’ franchise that we’ve all come to love.

What do I mean by this? Well, it’s all rooted in the gameplay itself.

The whole thing is developed around giving the player just enough freedom whilst also giving them things like stress and anxiety to think about. The key factors to any alien story are how your character would be in an encounter with a Xenomorph and how that would impact you emotionally.

The gameplay features remind me very much of the Alien RPG board game which uses things like stress and anxiety to impact the player and how they perform throughout the game. And the same goes for ‘Aliens Dark Descent’.

Your squad can get stressed and anxious during an encounter causing them to lose their focus. I had two of my marines get way too stressed during an ambush in a meat factory and the next minute I knew two of them were being dragged off by Xenomorphs and never to be seen again.

My other two barely made it out alive.

It’s great as it’s not just the player that’s getting stressed out by the situation unfolding in front of them, but also their squad (and in turn stressing out the player even more).

Another element in Aliens Dark Descent is the added suspense of the game is the infestation level.

But before I talk about this it’s best to give you a little bit of context with the story for Aliens Dark Descent.

In Aliens Dark Descent you start off by controlling Administrator Hayes onboard Pioneer Station orbiting the planet Lethe.

Aliens Dark Descent story begins with a biohazard containment unit offloaded from the supply shuttle Bentonville onto the cargo deck of Pioneer. These include cargo containers and what looks like cryo pods. Life onboard Pioneer looks to be going alright until a shady engineer decides to take control of the containment unit controls and open both the cargo containers and cryo pods.

Have you guessed what’s in them yet?

That’s right!

In traditional ‘Alien’ fashion, everything starts off slow at first, setting the tone for the big reveal. And that reveal comes when Administrator Hayes is alerted to some strange goings on in the cargo deck and finds it to be a bloodbath.

You get your first glimpse of the Xenomorph here, but things really go south when you make it back onto the bridge and then dozens of Face Huggers burst out of a vent and start latching themselves onto the helpless crew.

You manage to make it out of there to then initiate the Cerberus Protocol, a planetary containment procedure with satellites taking out targets with missiles to maintain quarantine. Your plan was to take out the Bentonville supply ship fleeing the station to stop the Xenomorph outbreak from spreading. Initially, it works and the ship is destroyed, however, the other ship, close to Pioneer, the Baldrin is also destroyed and the Colonial Marine frigate the USS Otago is badly damaged and sent into a decaying orbit.

Long story short you make it off of Pioneer Station with a squad of colonial marines led by Sargent Jonas Harper who has the unique genetic ability that links him to the Xenomorph hive mind allowing him to sense when they are near (a trait also mentioned in Audible’s Alien: River of pain). They then high tail it onto the Otago and survive a crash landing on the planet Lethe.

The Otago then becomes your base of operations allowing you to access places like the armoury allowing you to buy and develop new guns, the barracks to recruit new soldiers and the infirmary to tend to wounded squad members (to name a few).

Now getting back to it, you can deploy from here to mission zones around the planet, with the first one being the Colonist town of Dead Hills. If you decide to come back to the Otago before completing everything or from having to make a quick exfil from being overrun by Xenomorphs, you won’t be able to redeploy again that day. You will have to wait a few days (in-game) before having the opportunity to do so again. You can send out personnel to complete tasks in between however which are automatically operated.

However, each day you wait, the Infestation level of the planet increases. What makes this so great is that it heightens the suspense while also giving you more and more Xenomorphs to come after you while you’re on a mission. It’s a wonderful gameplay mechanic which feels right at home in the ‘Alien’ universe.

Now one thing that I was a bit concerned about is how the game would handle suspense if you could just go and look around the map away from your squad (like in most RTS games). I thought this would show you where the Xenomorphs would be and detract away from the looming threat and dread. However, this is not the case. You have a motion tracker with the iconic bleep to tell you when they’re nearby, but apart from the illuminated area around your squad you won’t be able to see any enemies approaching you until they are within your squad’s field of view.

It’s a very nice gameplay choice as it really puts you in the shoes of your squad, being able to only see what they see and it makes every choice and every command feel important and potentially life-threatening.

Graphics wise the game has a gorgeous art style with atmospheric lighting akin to the ‘Alien’ franchise.

Voice acting is top notch with some really stellar voices throughout. Music is downright creepy at times and has nostalgic references to the titular films. But above all the sound design is out of this world. Every blast of the pulse rifle, beep of the motion tracker and howl of the Xenomorphs feels authentic. The sound is used ideally to create tension and make your gameplay experience suspenseful.

Overall I had an absolute blast with ‘Aliens Dark Descent’ which gave me a perfect ‘Aliens’ story while introducing me to a new style of gameplay that I instantly fell in love with.

‘Aliens Dark Descent’ gets a solid 10 out of 10.