Aliens: Dark Descent

This game is criminally underrated; and was overshadowed by Final Fantasy XVI, Street Fighter 6 and Diablo IV which all released in and around the time it came out. It's atmospheric, stress inducing, insanely frustrating at times - but god has it got soul and passion baked into it and gameplay that punches way above it's weight class. So what is it? Well it's a struggle to describe this to people; it's Part RTS, Part Stealth Game, Part Rogue, Part Horror, Part Tactical game. It's a blend of multiple familiar systems mixed into it's own formula and gameplay loop. Typically the first thing people tend to think when they look at the screenshots is "Oh this is X-Com but with Geiger's Aliens." I can tell you immediately; no it's not. The philosophy behind the game is strikingly different. Where as X-Com is basically a difficulty curve that you start unequipped for and you scramble to level up / research to match and then eventually lead the arms race. In Dark Descent you're in the scenario where you are rarely if ever able to just out-gear and out-last your opponent. Instead you are here to juggle a range of different factors which compound over time and managing these compounding issues and still progress becomes the nature of the game. This is due to the key difference of not being turn based, but rather real-time with slow-motion (or pause depending on your taste). The game emphasises stealth, ambushes and calculated pro/con decision making over aggression, flanking and out-gunning your opponent. At first this is, no pun intended, alien-feeling if you're coming from other squad based tactical/RTS games; and when an enemy shows up your instinct of "shoot it" needs to be recalibrated to "how can I hide or get past this without causing unneeded commotion?" An escalation mechanic drives this approach - the more the aliens have you detected, the more they hunt, the more aggressive they become, and eventually special alien variants show up. This progressively wears you down or gets you in overwhelming situations where injuries and stress rack up and leave your marines either dead or spending time in the medical/therapy ward. Meaning you either end up waiting longer before redeploying; pushing up the difficulty of your next passively by an infestation level mechanic; or making the next run harder by being forced to use less experienced marines. In turn Marines are simultaneously your most valuable and fragile resource; being easy to lose and difficult to replace. If you are a fan of seeing a soldier in X-Com develop and write their own story; you'll love Dark Descents take on it. All your marines come in with character quirks that you have to learn to play around. There's no "recruit en masse and fire the crap ones" here; instead you get a rag-tag squad each bringing their own little problems to the table and somehow you just end up loving each of these a**h**** in their own way. One marine may make recovering between encounters harder; another may reduce the available resources, others may sabotage the squads mental health overtime forcing you to change your pace of progress. You can luck out and get rid of these issues; but marines are human, and being exposed to all the nightmare fuel of the Aliens world racks up so new problems develop. Over time they gain experience, classes and can be kitted out with different weapons and utility upgrades. The squad limit is very tight (4 raising to 5) so you'll very much want a workhorse "A-Team" - but you can't put all your eggs in one basket so it forces you to make a conscious decision of when to bring a newbie along because each new face in the squad means a big gap of capability you'll need to make up for. Narrative wise it's nothing too unfamiliar to any Aliens fan. Aliens show up, things go wrong, the cast need to find a way to escape/survive. However there's a somewhat interesting twist regarding nut-job cultists; meaning this time the Corporation isn't the worst thing trying to screw you over (though inevitably it still is). The Characters are okay. No one particularly stands out but they serve well enough to push the plot forward and frankly it's the squad and what happens on the ground thats the real story; you'll be remembering legendary moments or f-up's by particular marines more than the overall plot of the game. Gameplay wise each mission is a large map that presents new objectives as you progress and lets you clear it either in a single run or break it up into shorter "runs" as it was - with you choosing when to extract once you've achieved whatever objective you were going for. The games not rogue-like per-se (barring random events), but sometimes just popping in to just loot resources you left behind and then bugging-out to come back again later can be the better option. Other times deciding what to leave behind is more important than what you take. This may seem strange at first as it feels like self-imposed friction; however it's actually a key tool in maintaining control of the risk-reward variables you need to deal with. It's also curbed by a deathclock later in the game; so I highly recommend you take advantage of it while you can. Technically, as of date of this review (June 2026), the game is in a pretty good state but still has a couple of rough edges. First is several bugs and broken scripting that pop up; things like soft-locks, tutorial messages disabling controls, and cutscenes causing your squad to stop firing occur. It can be quite infuriating at times especially as manipulating the auto-save feature is really the only way or resolving these. It's also not getting any new content and is in maintenance mode. In a way this is refreshing as a "one and done" kind of experience; but as the core game still could do with a polish here and there it's a bit of a let down. If you can get past these issues it's certainly worth picking up in a sale; and good enough that I hope at some point it leaves steam for other platforms where it can be downloaded as a complete game to keep as it's a genuine gem that doesn't deserve to be lost.

I don't know if it's just me but I have been having trouble with my monitor or my pc almost everytime i opened this game up. At first it was overspiked temperature which i understand so i lower my graphics down but the issue keeps on happening to the point of it being very concerning. for the gameplay I find it very enjoyable but maybe it's just my PC that's having trouble with this game

Пройдя примерно половину могу сказать, что мне хотелось, чтобы игра понравилась, но если нужно выбирать между советовать/нет, то хочу сразу предупредить о нескольких моментах: 1) Почти на всех картах спустя определённое время начинает рождаться строго определённое количнство чужих из логовищ на данную карту. Доходит до смешного - ты можешь расстреливать их десятками и сотнями, но одна и та же "дыра" будет постоянно рожать чужого. Я понимаю причины этой механики - игрок обязан играть в тактический стелс, но выглядит это нелепо и впечатление очень сильно портит. Выглядит это как хреновый геймдизайн. 2) Почти на всех картах игрок обязан играть в стелс. Играть без стелса кратно сложнее. Поэтому есть обязательный класс разведчика, который вы обязаны брать на все карты. Всё. Нет разведчика - играете в догонялки сложности уровня тревоги чужих против скорости выполнения целей карты. Я всё понимаю, что есть определённая внутреняя логика игры и прочая. Суть претензии в костности самой тактики. Вариантов решения выхода на идеальное прохождения миссии одно и оно откровенно говоря душное. Прохождение сейчас поставил на паузу именно из-за этих двух пунктов по большей части - бесконечное подкрепление и необходимость выщёлкивать по одному из глушителя ради безопасности отряда. 3) Сохранения в произвольном месте нет. Есть автоматические контрольные точки. И на фоне особенностей самого процесса это не добавляет плюсов. 4) Баги есть. Они не критичные, но радомные и иногда странные, иногда досадные. ... Игру как будто постигла участь главных её персонажей: Был хороший и замечательный проект. Разработчики что-то сделали, что-то не сделали и бросили всё как есть на произвол судьбы. В итоге есть ощущение "покинутости" этого проекта. Как будто по принципу "и так сойдёт" решили не доводить до ума то, что казалось бы "должно не совсем так работать". Хотелось бы, чтобы что-то произошло хорошее - вышло не сильно дорогое DLC, какой-то балансные патч и это сильно помогло бы сделать проект "завершённым", но имеем то что имеем.

I really wanted to like this game. It effectively uses the Aliens setting to inject some interesting wrinkles into a familiar X-Com formula, the look and tone of the game is perfectly in line with the vibes of the franchise, and the mechanics really make it play differently than a typical X-Com clone. Unfortunately, it's catastrophically buggy (no pun intended). For awhile I was willing to work around the constant faltering pathfinding, stuck animations, broken autosaves and random detection system. Eventually though, these bugs reached a critical mass preventing me from progressing at all. I could no longer rest to save the game, or lose my "detected" status to interact with the objective, or even leave the mission because the elevator no longer worked. A complete restart of the game did not resolve this. This was the point at which I had to throw up my hands and admit I hadn't been having fun with this game for awhile. I really respect the ideas brought to the table here, but there is a crippling lack of polish on this game that eventually made it genuinely unplayable. With another kick at the can (and hopefully a higher budget), I would love to see these devs execute their vision in a manner befitting the passion they clearly have for the franchise but this is absolutely not it.

Hidden gem in the Alien franchise. Highly recommending it if you are a fan of RTS games. Feels like XCOM real time.

I have never played a game like this. What an immersive experience. I am blown away... and scared

Love the game but a little bit unoptimized since launch

Dark Descent is kinda difficult and underrated asf! Don't hesitate to try it out. It's really good.

Terrible story aside, the core gameplay of this RTS is actually pretty solid. Even thought the game has its flaws, like a save-scumming exploit for infinite ammo, totally brain-dead human enemy AI, and so on.

It is a fun game, but the timer in the end is really annoying and take the fun out of finishing the game.