You should never sprint. It's basically a death sentence. It's like the developers added the mechanic, gleefully anticipating people panicking and caving in to the temptation to use it.
I normally dislike control wheels in games. And the same reasons for that dislike exist here. They are kinda clumsy, unprecise and you have to memorise the positions of each item. It's not so bad in a game like Dragon Age: Origins, which has an active pause, but in a real time combat situation, where you need to use it to access weapons and gadgets on the fly, to survive, it can be very frustrating. Also, especially annoying in Isolation is the fact that every time you discover a new gadget, the wheel gets altered, shifting the positions of all your current gadgets, meaning you have to relearn all the positions. However, after weighing the benefits and disadvantages, I actually think it was a good addition to Isolation. It really adds to the sense of horror, as if you're desperately fumbling through a backpack for the gadget/weapon you need while death charges you down. Sometimes you grab the wrong item, sometimes you grab the item you need and stave off the alien, sometimes you look up to find you're too late and watch in disbelief as it kills you.
I really like the controls. I've never really made us of leaning mechanics in games. Couldn't get into Dishonored or Thief. Never used it in old FPS' like Medal of Honor on the PS2. It's probably why I'm so terrible at Red Orchestra. I think Wolfenstein: The New Order also has a leaning mechanic, but I don't recall ever using it. So, needless to say, I was surprised by how natural leaning felt in Alien.
When hiding, you can pull back on the analog stick and hold down L2. This makes you hold your breath and lean back, making you more undetectable to the alien. Strangely, and possibly due to how natural the controls felt, I actually started doing this before even knowing it was possible, or the game telling me to do so. I had no idea if it had any benefit, it just seemed logical. To me it was just a ritual, sort of how people tap A or B when trying to catch a pokemon. As far as I knew it was just an extension of the lean out of cover mechanic, with no actual function when in a cupboard. Possibly supposed to be used to get an alternate view out the gap. But no, turns out it was saving my life and I didn't even know it.
Another thing the game didn't tell me was the beeping on the motion tracker allowed the alien to detect me. It worked both ways, allowing me to track it, and it to track me. It took me a good 10 hours before I discovered this to be the case. It's cool to think that I've had a different, perhaps more tense gaming experience than others who knew this fact.
In a way, the weapons the game gives to defend yourself make you feel more helpless. Watching your flamethrower fuel run out while the alien takes no discernible damage, saps your hope as surely as the fuel.
Gadgets take a lot of resources to craft and are difficult to aim. You basically spend the game desperately scrambling to stay one step ahead of the alien, the crazy androids and the desperate, dangerous humans.
I love how you don't have a clear idea of what you're up against at any given time. There are times when humans sound friendly, but the moment you reveal yourself they begin shooting. One time I thought I was in a safe, hub area and decided to sprint. Seconds later the alien grabbed me. There was a part where I opened a door and an android walked out, causing me to immediately hide. It patrolled the area I was trying to get into, and I spent about 40 minutes trying to avoid it. At one point I was trapped between the alien in a corridor, and the android in the room next to me. I tried my luck with the alien and died. In the end I rushed in, completed my objectives then rushed out, missing all the items and collectables in the area. Curious as to what I had missed, I searched youtube to find out, only to see the player casually strolling past the android. It turns out he wasn't an aggressive android, and I'd wasted my time, and been making stupid decisions based on the assumption that he was. I basically tricked myself, doing the games job for it.
Just when you start to think you can predict the enemies actions, your illusions get shot down. Several times in the game, when humans have started shooting at me, the alien has always arrived and killed them. I can usually hide and wait until it's gone, killing two birds with one stone. So, when I ran into another group of humans, my reaction was to jump into a locker and wait for the alien to come. It did come, but while it attacked two of the humans, the third walked over to my locker, opened the door and executed me. That wasn't about survival, it was cold blooded murder. Things like this really give each individual enemy a personality. If he and his friends were going to die, he was damn sure going to drag me down to hell with him.
That leads me into another great thing about the game. You have a lot of choices in how to approach objectives. Combined with the unpredictability of the alien, and the large, semi-open areas, and you have a recipe for anecdotes. It's one of those games, like Skyrim, in which everyone has unique experiences and anecdotes, from funny to terrifying. Although following a linear story, every player has their own personal story running parralel with it.
I find the androids just as scary as the alien. I think this shows the skill of the developers in creating mechanics, and not just character models, that instill fear. On paper, the alien sounds and looks way scarier. In practice they are equally deadly and to be avoided. Event the humans are terrifying, if you accidentally run into them unprepared.
Extra points for Creative Assembly, a company that has spent the last 12 years almost exclusively making historical strategy games, to come out with a sci fi, first person, stealth, survival horror gaming masterpiece. I guess it sometimes takes an outsider looking in to see what makes a certain genre work. It was clearly a labor of love, the environment designs perfectly catching the look and feel of the films. You even get to visit the Derelict, Space Jockey ship. It's like walking around in the mind of H.R. Giger.
The motion graphics also struck me as really cool. The retro-futuristic vibe permeated every aspect of the game, from the launcher onward. It turns out that "the developers at Creative Assembly transferred parts of the game, like the inventory selection menu and the loading screen, onto VHS tapes and played them on old television sets. For further distortion, they messed with cables and magnets while watching the tube. They then recorded this and inserted the footage back into the game."* They certainly would have had the resources and know-how to create similar effects digitally, but I like how they chose practical effects. It's more authentic somehow. Like when a film used practical effects in lieu of digital effects.
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