4/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Alien: Isolation.

Alien Isolation is a game I held off playing for nearly a decade. As someone that loves horror games, especially survival horror, It's weird I hadn't played this prior. Whenever I see lists of some of the best horror games of all time, more likely than not, this game is on there. There wasn't any particular reason as to why I held it off, but I'm glad I finally got around to it, because as it turns out it's pretty great. I'm not someone with a huge attachment to the Alien franchise, I love Alien and Aliens, but outside of that, the series hasn't really got my attention since. Alien Isolation manages to capture that feeling of what made Alien great. The atmosphere, the sound design, the creature design, everything in this game just perfectly incapsulates what made the original film memorable and translates that into a near perfect survival horror game. My biggest pet peeve with the Alien franchise is that the Xenomorphs aren't really threatening by a certain point in the series. The entire first film has an entire crew struggling to take out one Xenomorph and it's incredibly tense, a feeling that most of the series has struggled to replicate. Alien Isolation makes the Xenomorph incredibly threatening, while you're able to distract and chase the Xenomorph away at points, you can't kill it. For the majority of the game you're completely on edge as the sound design creates this unsafe atmosphere, as if the Xenomorph could pop out of the ceiling at any second. The pitter patter of the vents above you, the thumping of footsteps in the distance, the intimidating shriek as it walks by the locker you're hiding in, everything works so well together at creating a really great horror atmosphere. I know I just spent an entire paragraph praising the Xenomorph, but the AI was kind of frustrating to deal with at points. It's never impossible to deal with the Alien, but based on the random nature as to how the Alien navigates the level, it makes predicting where he'll be more of a challenge at times. Sometimes you'll be hiding in a locker and he'll just walk away and immediately come back to the same spot, or he'll jump into a vent only to drop back down two seconds later without you doing anything. Maybe I'm just bad at the game, but I did find the AI to be unfun to deal with during certain levels. The Working Joes throughout the game are bullet sponges, I guess the idea is you're supposed to just be stealthy and or lead them away since they're super slow, but most of the time I just ended up walking past them and having to deal with the same few grabbing animations the game includes. It wasn't awful, most of the time levels are only filled with a couple scattered throughout, but when there's 6 or more chasing you it can be kind of annoying. The Humans on the other hand are on the opposite side of the spectrum as they are way too easy to deal with. I spent most of the game wasting my bullets on them, but as soon as I found out I can just use my melee and stun lock them to basically instantly kill them, they turned into the easiest enemy I've ever encountered in a horror game. On top of that, this game was really buggy. Now I have a pretty beefy PC and I know a lot of older games kind of break on newer hardware, but regardless, I encountered so many problems throughout the entire campaign. I had a bug where my game would randomly go into slow motion for about 5-10 minutes before deciding to fix itself. It wasn't lag because the sounds kept playing at a normal speed, but it felt like someone flipped a switch and turned me into Neo from the Matrix, but not in a cool way. Some characters and enemies were just missing layers of audio, there were other times when the Xenomorph's tail would bug out and clip through walls and look all distorted. At some points I would try and mantle over something or hide in a locker but then my character would accidently end up stuck in the wall and leave me unable to move, there was other times when I saved at certain points where I'd just instantly die, to say all of this was frustrating would be an understatement, but I still ended up loving this game regardless. As long as this list of complaints is I don't want to understate how great this game really is. It's been a long while since I've been scared while playing a horror game, and this does so very successfully. If you plan on checking this game out, I recommend doing it on console instead of PC, as from what I quickly read the major bugs I encountered were PC exclusive. I highly recommend giving this game a go if you haven't already.