Alien: Isolation

This game is clearly inspired by Bioshock. They even recreated that part in Bioshock's Fort Frolic where you pass through a corridor with a line of splicers covered in plaster posing as statues. They clearly tried to replicate the concept of Amnesia. You have to hide and avoid the enemies. However, they took the fear to a level where it's replaced by annoyance. They could have made the game a lot shorter because most areas are reused and revisited later on.

The environment art is perfect. The audio design is great. That's the good side of it and the reason for not giving a 6/10 score. The bad side is the gameplay that is a drag. They could have cut out entire sections of the game because the abuse of the hide away mechanic is what killed the game for me. When I reached half of the game I abandoned it. I went back with a trainer and infinite ammo, but that didn't fix the gameplay. Dropped and watched the rest of the game in video.

In Amnesia they placed encounters in a way that feels forced or out of place. Because the enemy just pops up out of nowhere and it just kills you. In Alien there are some segments without enemies, but they don't solve the issue with the alien or the androids. In the beginning the fear was fine, but after a while it became too annoying to have to constantly hide and wait for the enemy to walk away. The game becomes a drag because it just repeats the same pattern till the end. The androids don't run and don't have any long range attacks. They just pursuit you and force you to run and hide in some locker or under some desk. The alien does the same to the player. Even Amnesia didn't force hiding just about everywhere like what was done in Alien.

In Bioshock you have the pipedream minigame to hack turrets and cameras and unlock safes. However, you could either destroy the turrets and cameras or use auto hacking tools to not play the minigame. In Alien the hacking minigame is mandatory. You can't skip it. It's part of the main storyline.

Every mission in Alien is about activating something and going from point A to point B. All while the alien is stalking you. The level design included some redundancy because some crafting recipes and the monitors with the maps are duplicated in more than one location. In Bioshock, exploration was rewarded with cash and items. Sometimes more background story. In Alien, exploration is mostly punished with deaths because the damn alien is always sneaky. The reward for exploring is also too low, some crafting resources which can already be found everywhere else.

The save points are all located in sparse positions. When you die and you'll die a lot, you are forced to replay a lengthy part of the same mission. In multiple occasions I died while trying to hide or trying to save the game. In some missions I tried to complete part of it and then go all the way back to a save station just to be killed by the alien. No wonder why there is a mod to remove the damn alien from the game.

The windows version is clearly a lousy port from the xbox 360 version. The controller is preconfigured with an xbox controller image and buttons. The wheel to choose items and weapons is terrible. The default key bindings make this game almost impossible to play. The cutscenes have some issue with encoding because they are clearly under 30fps. The framerate is so low that they seem to be running a 15fps. They did something wrong.

This game was made for HDD. Playing it with SSD causes the loading screens to transition too fast and you'll miss important gameplay tips. The same thing happens with Prey 2017.

Goofs

At the nuclear reactor scene. What are the two NPCs doing there without any protective gear? There is radiation, electrical arches and who builds a reactor core with a control panel next to it?

You can't grab the guns dropped by the enemies

What are the human enemies doing firing at you while the environment is on fire and there is the alien around?

The green circle in the map disregards the floor making it confusing. It's the same mistake of Shadow Warrior 2. The goal marker disregards the Z axis.

Ideas of mine

Add some sort of stealth kill to compensate for the sparse ammo

Make the environment more interactive. In Bioshock there were oil puddles to set the enemies on fire or water to electrocute them. There is one scene where you can activate a gas leak to burn all the androids pursuing you, but it's one scene alone. They could have added pipes that you could shoot at to create a burst just to make the alien go away for ex.

Lock doors temporarily to slow down the androids

In Prey there was a signal that the player could activate just to make the nightmare alien go away for a while

There is a melee attack, but the androids always block it