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In a perfect world it would go without saying that a game based on the Alien IP would be utterly terrifying.
But after 2013’s Colonial Marines, you would be forgiven for nassuming this take on the series would also be a shooter – more ‘Aliens’ than ‘Alien’.
When it comes to Alien: Isolation, however, you would be very, very wrong: you will spend more time hiding in lockers and under tables, slowly reloading bullets, than blasting your way through hordes of xenomorphs. It’s a survival horror title through and through. Isolation is a scary game; you are relentlessly hunted down by a fiercely intelligent and uttery devastating Alien.
According to Creative Assembly lead game designer Gary Napper, making a truly intelligent Alien was a real focus for the team.
We’ve put so much love and care into the Alien – it really is the star of the show, it’s what we’ve built the game around,” he explains.
We can drop it into an area and have no idea what it is going to do. When we play the game it is exactly like when you, the player, pick it up. We have vague ideas about its behavior but putting it into an area and experiencing that for the first time is absolutely incredible.”
COMING OUTTA THE GODDAMN WALLS
Napper hopes that the Alien’s unpredictable nature will keep players on their toes, and coming back for more.
It’s such a unique experience,” he says. The more you play the game, the more you learn about the Alien through your interactions with it. It can sometimes be frustrating for game designers because they create all these systems but then someone hides in the corner and misses a load of them.”
