14 DAY TRIAL // Modern high-profile video games tend to try and limit player death as much as possible, making the gamer feel powerful at all times and giving him plenty of tools to kill his enemies before they are able to harm him.
During the E3 2014 demo for their upcoming Alien: Isolation, the development team at The Creative Assembly seems to be determined to show fans how many times they can die in about 20 minutes of play time and how much tension a set of classic and clear gameplay mechanics can create.
The situation is simple: Amanda Ripley is in a safe location, with a flamethrower and some other resources around, but the alien is out there and she needs to find a way to escape the location.
The first time I tried to do that, I died in about one minute, when I actually came face to face with the xenomorph and he quickly extended his multiple mouths to eat me.
Over the course of the rest of the demo, I tried to be more careful, move quietly and cover only small distances at once before finding cover and using my trusty tracker in order to try and pinpoint the location of the alien and try to find a way around him.
Alien: Isolation makes the player feel underpowered and creates a huge amount of tension, but it also emphasizes careful planning and purposeful movement and I suspect that many gamers will appreciate the way the developers have managed to re-create the feeling of the movies.
The only weapon I found, the flamethrower, can temporarily make the xenomorph move away and hide, but he always comes back, stalking the player and getting ready for the kill.
The death sequences for Amanda Ripley are both gruesome and varied and The Creative Assembly has clearly been happy to design them to show the power and the ruthless nature of the xenomorph.
Alien: Isolation looks very good, even in its current alpha state, and there are plenty of small details that catch the eye, the most interesting of which is a slight shift in perspective when the tracker is used that really makes the world feel real.
This might not be classic survival horror, but it does a great job of using the source material to deliver some interesting gameplay moments.
Alien: Isolation will be launched on the PC, the PlayStation 4 from Sony, the Xbox One from Microsoft and current-gen consoles on October 7 of this year.