How many Aliens licensed games have there been at this point? Enough for us to collectively forget that Aliens: Dark Descent was in development, certainly. Or at least we had until the first gameplay footage arrived this morning via IGN, along with a June 30 release date, which we watched and murmured a collective «that looks quite decent, actually».
Aliens: Dark Descent, which I feel duty bound to note is absolutely no relation of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is billed as a real-time squad-based tactical action game. It's being developed by Paris-based Tindalos Interactive which previously worked on a couple of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada games.
Dark Descent sees players taking control of and levelling up a squad of Colonial Marines as they're… Well, you've seen the movies. It's not going to go well! The game takes place on a moon called Lethe, which the Steam listing actually calls a planet, but hey I'm not the lore guy. In either case, the marines have crash landed from the USS Otago and in a terrible but also frankly inevitable twist of fate the joint is in the midst of being overrun by the iconic/phallic xenos.
Visually it looks clean and crispy—frosty, even—with the environments being a mix of the expected Weyland-Yutani corpo architecture and Giger's creeping biomechanical gloop. There's some neon signage splashed around, including a karaoke bar, suggesting Lethe was a relatively inhabited locale rather than a completely forgotten outpost.
I was intrigued to hear the narrator suggest that which marine takes on an issued task will be decided based on best contextual fit. Perhaps that points to a more streamlined (simplified?) take on the RTS, which would make sense given Dark Descent is also coming to consoles.
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