Just bought and played through 2014’s Alien: Isolation for the first time on the Nintendo Switch because it was on sale for 30% off and had been on my list for a long time. I wanted to play it earlier as a fan of Metroid and Dead Space, so why not experience the original franchise that inspired those games in an interactive form? I just never got around to it until now.
(I played through the game on hard mode)
The gameplay was truly exhilarating for the first half of the experience. The dilapidated Sevastopol station is almost a character in itself with the creaking of bulkheads, the sparking of damaged wiring and the constantly malfunctioning machinery you’re forced to make do with. Hiding from the Alien was a terrifying experience late at night with the sound up and the lights off. Outsmarting it can either make you feel incredibly smart or like the luckiest idiot in the world. The Androids were terrifying and the paranoid survivors with guns that could kill you in one shot were nerve-wracking as well.
Honestly though, nothing in the horror game genre matches the experience of desperately trying to hack a door or cut through it far from a save point and hearing a distant, yet familiar hiss and the beep and vibration of the motion tracker being triggered in your pocket.
As far as complaints about the game go, several aspects of the story drag on and seem kind of pointless. The game could easily have been half the length (10 hours) and still have made just a large impression on me. Honestly the ending in particular could have been cut down so much and it started to get very tedious doing so many chores by the end.
Another complaint would be the aiming on the Switch’s Joy-Cons. Those controllers are just not good at all for precise headshots required for the Androids or getting into gunfights with groups of survivors. Not a complaint against the game itself, just the Switch’s controllers.
So overall I’d probably peg the game at a 7.5 or 8 out of 10. It’s a technically impressive game that sets out to capture a specific feeling of helplessness and does it excellently. However the game itself is let down slightly by a bloated runtime filled with fetch quests and broken machines that require you to find pointless alternate routes. Also this version’s aiming on the standard controllers, but that can be alleviated with a Pro Controller or motion aiming.