There are two types of people in this world—Alien fans, and Aliens fans. Well, there’s also a third group who have seen neither🔯 and probably look at that sentence completely dumbfounded since all I did was add an ‘s’. But that ‘s’ changes everything. Alien is a slasher-like science-fiction classic where a single monstrous xenomorph stalks the Nostromo crew who are unable to escape as they’re picked off one by one. Aliens is an action horror about fending off hordes of xenomorphs as they swarm a group of marines on꧋ a derelict moon, upping the kills as any good sequel does.
Stick us on a spaceship, hand us some guns, and let us fight the hordes—Aliens sounds like the perfect shooter material. But the last two attempts at this fell flat. Fireteam Elite was another in a long line of misshapen Left♑ 4 Dea🦹d wannabes, while Dark Descent was little more than a hollow XCOM clone. Both tried to keep the horror intact while throwing hordes of xenomorphs at bland trope-laden soldiersꦫ, which reduced t🌊hem to a mindless swarm to point and shoot at.
Aliens worked so well as a film because, at the core, it’s still Ripley’s story. She ties it all together and it’s through her that we experience terror and hardship. Games that have tried to cash in on the premise of Aliens have used bland soldiers with no personalities, so there’s no attachment to be made. Why am I scared if a xenomorph rips generic grunt #3 apart when I can just rope in ge🐭neric grunt #4 to take their place? It’s not like generic grunt #3 has a story or any personality worth caring about, he just says “boo yah” and tells the squad to move w♋hen I click. Real charming guy, that generic grunt #3.
Isolation is the only good Alien game in recent years and it’s all thanks to Ama✱nda, Ripley’s daughter. She’s stalked by a lone xenomorph she cannot feasibly fight, just as her mother was. That means we have to hide, sneak aroꦡund, and slowly figure out a way off the ship without it catching us. The xenomorph isn’t just one part of a homogenous blob that piles on top of itself to reach us as we mow it down with gunfire, it’s an individual threat that is hunting us, treating us like prey.
It almost feels personal, like the two of us are entangled in the same dance, always find꧟ing our way back to each other. That connection is exactly why the triumphant victory at the end feels so rewarding, because instead of fighting enough xenomorphs to fill out a stat page, we emerged victorious against the one that had hounded us from the start. And even when Isolation throws a group at us, we can’t just shoot at them until their health bar depletes—we have to run.
It’s easy to see why Aliens games lean so hard into the fort-under-siege aspect of the movie. It’s when the action is at its most exciting, as Ripley and Co. hold their ground, picking off 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:xenomorphs as they rip through the ceiling, floorboards, and vents. But without Ripley or anyone to care about in these moments, the games are doomed to be little more than generic shooters. It’s time to go back to basics and unpack the xenomorph at its mos𝔍t pure, the lone hunter who is unstoppable, cutting through everyone in its path. That’s Alien at its strongest, not when the xenomorphs are reduced to mindless cannon fodder to fill out a power fantasy.