Hands on with TENSION, the game
Aliens: Dark Descent, from Tindalos Interactive and Focus Entertainment, contains all of the tension you’d expect from a game set in the Alien universe, but it does so within an extremely competent tactical experience. I had the opportunity to take the game for a spin recently, and came away very impressed and optimistic with what the project was able to accomplish: namely, trying to scare the heck out of me on a crowded show floor.
Okay, maybe not fully scared, but I may or may not have crushed a mouse and nearly bashed in a the WASD keys on a keyboard. I’m sorry, booth PR team.
I used to love playing isometric tactical squad-based games in the past, but there hit a point where they tended to all feel the same. Click here, go there, open a door, click to shoot bad guys. Repeat. But Dark Descent does something that might bring me roaring back — it has Xenomorphs. The PAX East demo focused on introducing us to the game’s many systems, which include traversal and combat alongside managing our environment and upgrading our team and its loadouts. Whew! There’s a lot of information in the game, alongside a GUI that’s a little complex to understand at first, but sometimes the best way to get our feet wet is to just get pushed into the pool.
And hooooo boy does a demo like this push us in.
It kicks off with a simple enough mission: help the Colonial Marines figure out where all the people have gone on a massive ship. We command a squad of 4 to find their way through the dark corridors and sparking girders of the ship and its underbelly, walking through rooms and discovering bodies, items, and tools. And tech! We have to interface with a lot of tech, tech that can increase our skills or open doors or adjust ramps or view notes from the deceased scientists or take control of cameras around the ship. Cameras can help us pinpoint the things we’re looking for, they can unlock sidequests, and they can help us see any Xenomorphs in the area.
And that’s where things really get interesting and THICK.
The Xenomorphs sense stress, and if we move around too quickly, miss items, make a lot of noise, or any do other number of things our stress levels (there’s a meter for it) start to go up. Each squad member has their own stress level, with different things that can set them off, so it’s important to balance what we’re doing with who we’re doing it with. If the beasts sense us they become more aggressive and start to make their way towards our direction (we can see them on our map — thanks, cameras!), so we either have to calm the fuck down or get ready for an attack.
Some of the attacks are small. In one area while I needed to grab a keycard, only two enemies popped up near me to attack, and my team took them down fairly easily (just point, click, and watch them shoot with whatever weapons I have equipped). However, one corridor led us right towards a nest and the only way we could even think of surviving was to make a run down a hallway and into a safe room, welding the door behind us and waiting out the rush.
It’s that little level of anxiety causing me to apply a vice grip to the poor mouse that I can appreciate here. I want to be a little scared. I want to feel like the situations have weight. It’s even more so apparent towards the end of the demo, as our final task is to set up sentry turrets we’ve collected into a room to protect us while we try to hack open an airlock door behind us. As the turrets are set and our stress is at an all-time high, a massive wave of aliens blows into the comms room we’re in. I sit back and hope the guns would mow down the beasts while my team preps for escape. However, I don’t realize that the turrets need to be maintained and repaired when I have a break and the Xenos are preoccupied elsewhere, so my defenses fail and the scene ends with a final bloody rush that wipes me out.
Yikes!
But also, cool!
It’s rare that I want to play a demo again so quickly, but I feel like I could have had it if I JUST did this one thing, or that other thing, or explored this other area first.
It’s good tension. Good stress.
And we’ll get to go hands on with it again when Aliens: Dark Descent launches for consoles and PC on June 20th.
Images and video courtesy Tindalos Interactive and Focus Entertainment.
The game earned a Team Choice Award as one of SideQuesting’s favorite, must-see projects of PAX East 2023.
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