Aliens: Dark Descent review - game over, man, game over

Aliens: Dark Descent doesn't seem like it should be a horror game. Viewing the action from an impassive isometric view, in this squad-based, single-player game, you direct your team around a series of sci-fi facilities that look like they were falling apart even before they got attacked by monsters from space. It's fairly mundane, you can double-click to make the team run and you scoot around taking care of objectives and hoovering up supplies. And then the Xenomorphs appear, and without fail, everything takes an express elevator to hell and it quickly becomes a candidate for a survival game.

This happens all of the time in basically everything ever made with the Alien license and here it's the same: corporate greed and a "couldn't happen to us" mentality combine to see the sleek black predators unleashed on yet another group of defenseless spacers. Aliens: Dark Descent doesn’t buck this trend, and you control a Weyland Yutani deputy administrator, Meeko Hayes, who seems to be the only voice of reason but is unable to prevent bugaggedon anyway.

Survivin' ain't easy

When the Colonial Marines show up though, they're genre savvy: anyone with a facehugger - an alien parasite, if you're not a fan - is executed with gunshots after the first chest burster pushes its way through shattered colonist ribs. The Colonial Marines take the Xenomorph threat seriously and respond with as much force as they can cobble together. Sadly, after the crash, this isn’t much and you’ll have to scrape, scrimp, and research to try and get a half-decent arsenal together. 

This may not be Hayes’ mess - Weyland Yutani’s not-so-invisible hand is all over the bloody prologue - but in trying to stop the Xenomorph’s escaping the system she activates the Cerberus Protocol, a planetary defence system that cripples the escorting Colonial Marine vessel, and her own ship. This means there’s nothing in and nothing out on the planet they’ve all crashed down on, and it’s just her, a few ragtag survivors, and an APC to keep the Xeno scum at bay. 

There are aliens and it’s a tactics game, so a lazy comparison is to compare it to XCOM, but it’s actually more like Full Spectrum Warrior - rather than control your soldiers individually, you’re controlling a unit. They’ll live or die together, and the only flanking maneuver you can attempt is with an APC. Action is in real-time, too. Tap the order button and the action will slow to a crawl (or pause, depending on your settings) for you to issue an order whether that’s pulling a shotgun for a close-range blast, tossing a grenade, or having one of your marines get their gun up to cover a doorway. It feels different from everything out there, but it’s the perfect way to get across how essential sticking together is for your team’s continued survival.

Not that survival will be easy. The Xenomorph threat grows with each firefight, so you’ll regularly have to turn your tail and flee as the threat indicator rolls up past hard as your medical supplies and ammo start to run low. One of the most interesting things about Aliens: Dark Descent is the way it models each location persistently. This means that when you come back the next day, you’ll see the doors you’ve welded closed, the dead marines you left behind, and any supplies you didn’t scrape together the first time. Each mission will often take a few attempts as you try to preserve life and supplies, but it’s okay because for every failure you’ll get the chance to face that misery a few times, and isn’t that what video games are all about?

Combat is tricky outside of that, too. Your marines are at their best when they’re holding a secure position with a full magazine of ammo. However, if you stand in one place for too long, you’ll run out of ammo and be as defenceless as the poor colonists you see scattered around the levels. So, the aim of the game is to keep moving from objective to objective with your small group of marines and avoid getting pinched. During this, welding doors shut can create temporary rooms to destress your marines and take a minute to heal and reload.

Boots on the ground

It’s not just garden-variety Xenomorphs you’ll throw down with. It lets the fantasy down a little bit to fight the other bugs in my opinion, but there are some other interesting enemies in there that I’ll try not to spoil, and really most of the time it is just your regular old tall, dark and scaly monsters you’ll throw down with. Your marines will slowly specialise to better defeat these too, and you’ll soon find yourself picking classes for your marines and giving them better firepower.

Away from these missions, there’s a small base where you fool around with the armoury (for guns), medical quarters (to heal the body or trauma), and a laboratory (for research). This feels a little more like Xenonauts in practice, but I didn’t really interface with it too much. Getting hold of better firepower is appreciated, but Aliens: Dark Descent is at its best when you’re boots on the ground, trudging around a planet full of cassette futurism dystopia and trying not to get chewed on. It looks the part, it sounds incredible - the shriek of dead Xenomorphs and the chattering of pulse rifles brought a smile to my face - and while it’s hard to recommend a game that’s so ruthlessly efficient at punishing you for your mistakes, as an Alien fan it was easy to enjoy.

If Alien: Isolation is the perfect Alien video game, Aliens: Dark Descent is, thematically, the perfect Aliens game. Combat has the same feeling as that doomed Coolant Tower firefight, while survival feels, in the long run, just as unlikely. Still, compared to the optimism and slowly increasing power in most strategy games, the complete lack of hope here is quite charming, really.

Accessibility 

There’s no dedicated accessibility options menu, but there are subtitles available in the audio menu, and some colourblindness correction settings, with the ability to choose between options for deuteranopia, tritanopia, and protanopia, with a colour correction slider. Additionally, you can change the default slow motion when you trigger the skills menu into a full pause by toggling the Pause Game setting to On on the gameplay menu. 

How we reviewed Aliens: Dark Descent

Much like most strategy games, Aliens: Dark Descent is most at home as a PC game so I played around 20 hours of the game’s campaign on that platform, playing on the game’s standard difficulty, and also investigating a bunch of the incredibly scant additional objectives that are offered up. I played this on a gaming PC with an RTX 4080, and it ran smoothly without any glitches or noticeable performance hitches. While there is controller support, I stuck with a mouse and keyboard.

Aliens: Dark Descent is out now on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.