Aliens: Dark Descent

The Alien franchise is something of a recurring hyperfixation for me. I can turn on the Special Edition of Aliens anytime, anywhere, and have just a jolly old time. I love Ridley Scott’s original film as well, but the sequel has my heart. For being such a dark and macabre IP, I find its horrific aesthetics and concepts strangely comforting. The sterile retrofuturism aesthetic that informs the 80’s vision of a future corporate dystopia combines with H.R. Giger’s disturbing, psychosexual, biomechanical abominations to create a match made in hell. None of that should be cozy by anyone’s standards, but I’m probably just some kind of idiot.

I find strange comfort in the disturbing discomfort. I’ll go on long kicks of Alien franchise fixation, consuming the media, buying merchandise, and building custom models out of LEGO bricks. Eventually, my dreams get all creepy and Gigery and I have to take a step back for a little while. While currently on one such dark descent of my own, I finally gave Tindalos Interactive’s Aliens: Dark Descent the attention I’ve been meaning to.

I purchased the game on Steam many months ago. Being a huge fan of both Alien and XCOM, this game looked like a great match for me on paper. Despite the “Unsupported” warning on the store page, I picked it up during a sale with the intent to play it on my Steam Deck. At the time, Steam Deck HQ had given it a middling performance rating, but said it was playable with compromises. This was not my experience at all, as no amount of tinkering I did could make the game look like anything but muddy, low-detail ass and not crash every 20 minutes. My gaming PC is elderly at this point, so running it there wasn’t an option, and I did not yet acquire my GabeCube. Largely due to the game’s rather hand-holdy opening hours—coupled with me not wanting to burn out my Deck’s battery and probably poison myself on the exhaust fumes spewing out of its poor, overworked vents—I just ended up sitting on it for months. Eventually, my desire to actually give it a proper go won out, so bought a PS5 copy and finally dug in. While the game has its ups and downs, the highs are high enough that I can confidently give it a positive rating, especially for fans of the franchise.

Going Down the Express Elevator to Hell

Dark Descent plays like a hybrid mishmash of concepts across both real-time and turn-based strategy games, with a little bit of Pikmin thrown in for good measure. You control a squad of Colonial Marines as a single unit; you move as a group, and your ability to split them up is limited to assigning them to go take care of contextual tasks found on the map, like opening chests or welding doors. Once a marine completes a task, they will automatically join back up with the group. The squad is controlled with a cursor interface, selecting where to send your marines instead of directly controlling their movement with a stick. While the squad is moving, you also have control over the direction they are aiming their weapons and flashlights. Each marine also has a selection of skills and abilities specific to their loadout and class, which can turn the tide of a battle when used properly. Using the menu for these abilities slows down time, allowing you a little breathing room in the heat of the moment. Activating one also consumes a resource called Command Points, which slowly regenerates over time. The squad deploys and extracts from an invulnerable armored vehicle. Each map has a selection of preset zones that act as both starting positions and a kind of fast travel system. As they are unlocked around each map through progression, you open up more areas to start from on future deployments, and areas you can move your squad between during a mission in the safety of the vehicle. The ARC (later replaced by the upgraded APC) has its own automated weapons as well, which can create a zone of relative safety with its additional firepower.

There are several core aspects that add depth to the strategy gameplay and intermingle with each other: Resources, Stress, and Alien Aggressiveness.

Your in-mission resources take the form of Medical Supplies, Tools, Ammo, and Sentry Guns. All of these have multiple applications and can be replenished on the battlefield by finding and opening corresponding chests scattered about the maps or looting dead bodies. Tools, for instance, can be consumed by repairing environmental objects and Sentry Guns, or by welding doors shut to block off xenomorph access and create safe shelters. You have limited carrying capacity for Tools, Sentries, and Medical Supplies, and all of them are persistent between deployments as well. Your base has an overall supply, which is drawn from when you allocate supplies to your squad for a deployment. Replenishing them between deployments requires spending Supplies, your primary currency that is used for other important things like permanent upgrades and weapon unlocks.

As marines engage in combat, their Stress meters increase. With each tier of Stress, penalties are applied to their performance, with the potential to imbue longer-term detriments to individual squad members as well. In the field, you can manage your squad’s Stress levels by resting in shelters (which requires Tool resources to create by welding doors shut), or consuming some of your Medical Supplies as anxiety meds. Either way, the resources you need to do either one are limited, so leveraging the light stealth mechanics to stay undetected and avoid direct combat for as long as possible is generally the best strategy.

The other core feature is the Alien Aggressiveness mechanic. Once the xenos are aware of your squad’s presence, they will begin actively hunting them, sending aliens toward their location. Hunts can be disrupted by running the timer out or hiding in shelters, but for every second you are being hunted or in active combat with xenos, the Alien Aggressiveness ticker increases. As it reaches higher tiers, more numerous and more powerful alien types will spawn. At certain thresholds, “Massive Onslaughts” and/or “Category Two” xenomorphs will signal their approach. In these moments, you generally need to use the limited time you have to set up a defensible position against the incoming threats. Proper use of your limited supply of Sentry Guns is almost always a necessity to survive these instances. The meter resets at the end of a deployment, giving you a fresh start the next time you drop in.

These mechanics all synergize quite well into a system that forces you to make difficult decisions and prompts you to carefully consider when to start evacuating if you’re drained of resources and have swarms of dangerous xenos biting at your heels. It really helps solidify the danger that the infestation presents to the planet.

Assholes and Elbows

The strongest design choice for me was the overall structure of the game. The campaign is broken up into a series of in-game days. Each day, you have a maximum of one deployment, where you send your squad into one of the available locations to complete objectives. Maps are pretty open and continue to expand as you complete objectives that open up new areas. Many objectives can be completed in any order, and there is a lot of room for optimizing runs to complete as many as you can on each deployment. Between days, you will also have to deal with randomized events that can offer benefits or challenges. For instance, you might have the option of forgoing that day’s deployment in order to acquire more resources; or, you may have to deal with infighting between your marines, which may result in one or both of them being put out of commission for a few days. Each day, there is an “Infestation” meter that ticks upward, representing the overall spread of the hive on the planet. As it reaches higher milestones, you can expect more numerous xeno encounters during deployments.

Partway through the story, a countdown is introduced that puts a time pressure on the entire campaign. From that point on, you will have a limited number of days to complete all of the primary objectives and finish the story. The lingering threat of the countdown synergizes very well with the Stress and Alien Aggressiveness mechanics; it all comes together in a very smart way that forces players to push themselves, take risks, and try to be as efficient as possible; you want to complete your objectives, but also learn to recognize when it’s too risky to keep going. It adds a strong “push-your-luck” aspect into each deployment; you have to find a balance between efficiency and outright recklessness.

The core gameplay is unconventional, but the design greatly streamlines the busywork and micromanagement that many RTS games require while still offering a strong tactical experience. The design also makes it completely comfortable to play using a controller. In my 30+ hours with the game, I exclusively used a traditional controller with the default scheme, which worked quite well.

You Look Just Like I Feel

Taking notes from games like XCOM, Dark Descent also has a management layer that requires you to put your limited resources to good use. Keeping your squads healthy and properly equipped to handle the escalating threats is essential. Each marine is a long-term investment, and losing one to the game’s permadeath mechanics (more on those later) can be a significant blow to your future prospects. As they gain battlefield experience, marines level up and diversify into one of several specialized classes. Each class offers unique benefits, and selecting the proper combination is incredibly important in the game’s later missions. In addition to positive progression, squad members can also pick up some negative traits if they experience too much Stress and sustain traumatic injuries (completely understandable when your day job involves fighting endless swarms of chitinous nightmare beasts), which can introduce unsavory compulsions or squad dynamics. For instance, they can become junkies and use up medical supplies whenever they rest, or gain a compulsive desire to keep their gun fully loaded, gaining stress whenever they have anything less than a full magazine. While there are ways to overcome these traits, the avenues to do so use up time and resources, so you will sometimes have no choice but to send marines into the field who are in a less-than-stellar condition.

Game Over, Man

What really didn’t work for me was the game’s half-hearted approach to permadeath. Aliens: Dark Descent includes all the systems needed to support a play-through-your-mistakes style of gameplay—resource management, long-term consequences, injury systems—but it undermines them by refusing to fully commit. If your entire squad is wiped out during a mission, you can’t regroup with new recruits or adapt to the setback; your only option is to reload a previous save. Marines are only considered permanently dead if at least one squad member survives and extracts, which discourages the kind of emergent storytelling and tactical improvisation that permadeath systems thrive on. The issue is compounded by scripted encounters that trap you in battles with no way to extract until a specific threat is cleared. It feels like a compromise—as if the checkpoint system is a fallback to a more traditional failure state, compensating for punishing boss design rather than embracing the consequences of loss. It wants to have its permadeath cake and eat it too, which hamstrings the system from the get go.

Not Just Another Bug Hunt

My other main critique is the enemy variety. The number of unique enemy types is just okay; it feels like the minimum amount of variation needed to keep the game entertaining for its runtime, but it does get repetitive by the end and loses its ability to surprise you much anymore. Another standard enemy type or two would have gone a long way in keeping things feeling fresh. Maybe including something like the Spitter from Fireteam Elite would have added some variety to the Xenos’ tactics, being able to force your marines into cover. Or the Burster, which could have added some waves of fodder that are easy to kill, but extremely deadly if they close enough to become an acid-filled kamikaze.

The Category 2 Xenomorphs—the larger, more dangerous xeno strains that spawn in the higher Alien Aggressive thresholds—are a great idea, effectively raising the stakes and giving you an “oh shit” moment when one is announced to be coming for your battered, panicking squad. However, the fact that there are only two variants in the category with limited tactical differences does deflate the encounters a bit. However, I think it’s great that Praetorians and Crushers continue to be acknowledged in canon media. Hopefully, we'll see some form of them in a film at some point. There are also multiple Queens encountered throughout the campaign, with some of them being optional challenges that lead to powerful upgrades when defeated. These are the only true “boss fights” in Dark Descent, offering a stiff challenge that requires proper planning and preparation if you don’t want to be constantly reloading checkpoints trying to catch a lucky break.

There are also a few very basic human enemy types, which either charge at your squad with melee weapons or trade fire from cover. But fighting them is more of a brief mixup than anything of real tactical depth. Confronting them forces you to switch to cover-based tactics, but there is not a lot of decision making that goes into how you handle them. However, it does become a bit more interesting when you have the option to pit Xenomorphs against them and have them take each other out. But this is obviously a no-go for the advanced cultists that can safely walk amongst the aliens. It does become more interesting when the two enemy types work alongside each other, forcing you to make proper use of your squad’s abilities to survive. Additionally, the human presence gives you something else to shoot that does not directly trigger xenos into immediately launching a hunt; as long as you skidaddle after making noise, you can battle human enemies and then try to run before the xenomorphs notice your squad. Overall, the human v human encounters effectively add a drop of variety to the bucket, but the mechanics aren’t quite developed enough to make them all that interesting on their own.

Where Do You Want It?

Since most of the game takes place in real-time strategy layer, good environmental design is paramount to a fun experience. Fortunately, the game excels at this aspect, which you will notice as you progress through a variety of environments that seem to pull inspiration from all over the original 4 films, plus some more original areas. The first main area, Dead Hills, is a “shake-and-bake” colony similar to Hadley’s Hope. The Refinery area evokes much of the imagery from Alien 3’s penal colony, while being much more open and less claustrophobic. The various sprawling starship and space station interiors recall the grey, industrial designs of the Nostromo and Auriga. The rocky canyons of a one-off mission are similar to the obsidian spires of LV-426. While these locations successfully recapture the vibes and aesthetics of the film locations, they also do a good job not just being low-effort rip offs; they’re developed enough to have their own sense of place and identity.

Most of the maps are enormous, with numerous explorable areas filled with hidden things to find. Most are also multi-layered, with stacked floors that you can travel between with elevators. Your interactions with the map are also retained across deployments; for instance, doors you welded shut stay welded the next time you visit, and deployed Sentries will remain exactly where you left them.

After the first few missions, the areas become more unique, particularly in the game’s latter half. Berkeley’s Docks is a rain-soaked maze of shipping containers, warehouses, and clutter. The Atmospheric Processor is surrounded by a damp, gloomy jungle, making it somewhere a Predator would be right at home stalking through in an AVP story. The mountainous, snow-covered outpost of Tantalus Base makes for a suitably remote and hostile location (Xenomorphs stalking through the snow just looks right. We haven’t really seen that on screen since the 2004 AVP movie). Jackson’s Landing is a sprawling urban city, with a gigantic, brutalist corporate office tower at its center. The Xeno City at the end dives face-first into Giger’s biomechanical orifice, offering a rare extended glimpse of what a true alien civilization looked like in the Alien universe.

The ending was okay, but too scripted. I would have preferred a final, difficult climax using the marines I built up over the course of the game. There is a wave-based scenario right before the final stretch that kind of fills this role, but the impact of the final area was lessened for me when I was forced to use the preset story characters in a linear mission. Instead of a final mission that acts as the culmination of all of your progress so far and dials up the mechanical framework you’ve been playing within for many hours, the game strips itself of its unique flavor and retreats to something far more basic. I get that this is a compromise made in order to hit the story beats they wanted, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.

You Still Don’t Understand What You’re Dealing With, Do You?

The story never rose above “fine” for me. There are a lot of interesting concepts that make for the bones of a good story, but nothing is really fleshed out enough to reach its full potential. In some ways, it feels like a story out of one of the franchise’s old comic books. It’s not exactly a film-worthy tale, but it gets the job done and facilitates getting the action going without breaking the canon. I’ll wrap my scattered thoughts in spoiler tags below if you feel like getting my point of view on the story.

The concept of a Xeno-worshiping cult that coexists with the aliens is a really compelling idea, but the execution is a bit lacking. The design of the Guardians in particular is quite good; very unsettling. But the redneck accents they speak with just didn’t mesh well with their creepy, inhuman aesthetic.

The story of Harper and his daughter didn’t exactly come out of nowhere—there were multiple references foreshadowing her appearance—but their relationship was nowhere near as developed as it should have been to make the ending have the impact it was intending.

Maeko Hayes was a decent enough protagonist, but her turn from company suit to rebellious warrior also suffers from the lack of fleshing out that plagues the rest of the story.

The main antagonist, Marlow, has some interesting aspects, like his reverence for the xenos and his penchant for using Synthetics bearing his own face, but he is mostly relegated to a background presence and his motivations are barely touched upon.

There are zero references to the prequel films, which I see as a positive. Prometheus and Covenant are very divisive. I would guess that there are very few people who dislike Aliens but love Prometheus. Therefore, keeping this in the vanilla Aliens category avoids any risk of… ahem… alienating those who hold the prequels in ill regard. I think the prequel movies are mostly fine (I actually like a lot of Prometheus, which I would say is far better than Covenant, which I only barely tolerate), and I think both Fireteam Elite and Romulus did a decent job of organically incorporating elements of them into the standard vibes. But it’s nice to have this game stay squarely within the classic vibes while forging some of its own paths.

The voice acting and cutscene character animation ranged from “pretty good” to “kinda bad”. Certain bits of in-game chatter from both your marines and the cultists were distractingly bad at times. But a bigger complaint is the overwhelming number of lines directly pulled from Aliens and cheekily shoehorned into slightly different contexts. Dark Descent is even worse than Alien: Romulus in that regard.

The music largely does a good job of reinforcing the foreboding atmosphere of the nightmare the characters find themselves in, switching to frenetic chaos when the action ramps up. Many of the cues are taken from the second film in particular. It doesn’t do much to stand on its own, however, and certain areas are strangely devoid of appropriate sound. The squad deployment screen being so quiet is a strange choice, especially since it looks so heavily inspired by XCOM’s bombastic counterpart. Instead of a valor-inducing military fanfare, all you really notice are the strangely flat mechanical whirs of the power loader moving stuff in the background.

Get Away from Her, You Glitch!

The visuals overall are serviceable and effectively capture the tone of the series, but this game is not a graphical powerhouse by any means. The environments are particularly good-looking and moody in the main strategy gameplay, even at the closest zoom levels. It’s when the camera gets close up to the characters and expects them to emote that the cracks start to show. Also, the developers did us a kindness by including an option to turn off the marines’ dialogue when issuing move orders; the repetition will get to you.

I did encounter a few glitches during the course of the game, but most were nothing game-breaking. In my 30 hours or so, there were two instances where a marine became stuck and unresponsive to commands forced me to restart a distant checkpoint and lose progress. Most of the others were simply cosmetic annoyances, such as an objective waypoint or text notification not going away when it should. While my playthroughs were fortunately pretty smooth, I have heard many experiences from others that saw game-breaking bugs ruin save files late into an Ironman playthrough. Sticking to the normal permissive saves is probably the safest bet, as there no longer seem to be any more bug fix patches on the way.