Aliens: Dark Descent (2023)

Still playing this one, having given it another shot after stepping away briefly. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs still present on console and one of them is preventing me from 100-percenting a level. I’ve started a few different playthroughs with different squads on different difficulties which is fun but I guess I’ll be halting with this one until the other bugs have been patched for the console version.

I’m tempted to keep going but I’ve read that a lot of the game-breaking bugs are further in the game and I’m not gonna be happy if I get to those points and experience them for myself. So I’ll wait, and that’s okay. I’ll be happy to come back when they’ve patched it.

I played about a dozen hours of Aliens: Dark Descent. My long story short verdict is that I appreciate it but it's not for me. My perfectionism is an obstacle in my enjoying this game because I'm attempting to force my performance in a level to be without error while completing as much of the level as possible. That results in frustrating gameplay. Waiting for long periods for enemies to pass, constantly reloading from a savepoint as soon as I make a mistake, and trying to avoid as much combat as possible; while simultaneously trying to collect every collectible and piece of loot I can. I'm not playing this game how it should be, and that's on me. It gets to the point where I'll put three hours into a level but the total playtime is only 15 minutes or so.

But I don't know if I can keep going with this one. The ratio that governs my gaming these days, the little equation in my head, is telling me that I'm going to have to spend a lot of time on this game to crack it and that might be time I don't have; or at least, it might be time that would be better spent elsewhere.

It's a little discouraging to me because this is a totally new type of game to me and it would be cool to obtain mastery over it rather than letting it defeat me. And the game is really well made. The characters are well-acted, the story is decently interesting, and the environments are well-designed. But the mechanics, being new to me, feel overwhelming, and I feel a thick dose of option paralysis when in a level. My mind and decision-making process are both moving faster than my understanding of the controls and gameplay.

I'll take a break from it for a few days and see if it calls out to me. If not, maybe I'll watch some walkthroughs and/or catch the story cutscenes on YouTube. After all, this type of game - real-time strategy - is not my type of game, and if it weren't for it being Aliens, I most certainly would never have picked it up to begin with.