Alien: Isolation Challenges You To Make It Through Survivor Mode
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After being on the way seemingly forever, Creative Assembly is finally only a few weeks away from dropping their new video game, Alien: Isolation, into your eager, waiting laps. Aside from the setting and overall set up, there are a number of things that make this game unique, and this new featurette highlights one of them: Survivor Mode.
Not only does the gameplay in this video look fantastic, but at the CA offices, when the designers were testing and playing the game, they started to notice that everyone had their own strategy they employed. Some played the game fast and loud, making as much progress as they could before hiding from the xenomorphs. On the other hand, some were stealthier in their approach, quietly sneaking through each mission, avoiding conflict and dicey situations.
This highlights the various different ways you can play Isolation, which they attempted to design so that no two games are ever identical, but it also gave them an idea. The designers got so competitive with each other that they finally instituted Survivor Mode, which lets you complete challenges against the clock, all while still being hunted by armor-plated alien killing machines. Each individual mission has its own parameters for scoring, and not only can you play against your friends, the scores post to a central hub online, so you can compare your prowess against the rest of the world. When they unveiled this feature at E3, it was reportedly a big hit both with players and viewers as well.
Set between the events of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, Isolation puts you in the point of view of Amanda Ripley, daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, who is first mentioned in the director’s cut of Cameron’s film. She works for the ubiquitous Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and when they locate the flight recorder of the ill-fated Nostromo, her search for her missing mother kicks up a notch, and she winds up on Sevastopol, where, as you can imagine, she encounters a certain species of acid-blooded alien that is none too pleased to see her. Or maybe they are glad to see her, because they can use her as an incubator for their young.
Alien: Isolation will be available on all the usual gaming platforms, like PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox 360, and hits stores on October 7. And it gets even better than that. Depending on where you purchase your copy, and which region you reside in, you can gain access to exclusive DLC missions that bring the cast of the original film back together for the game. This includes Weaver’s Ripley, Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), Parker (Yaphet Kotto), and Dallas (Tom Skerrit). That should be more than enough to get you pumped up for this, unless you don’t like video games or Alien, then maybe not.
