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 Main website https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RBHmsKl624 quote:CAN YOU STOP THE ONSLAUGHT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgYo55oOQk Aliens: Dark Descent is a real-time tactics video game developed by Tindalos Interactive in collaboration with Disney's 20th Century Games and published by Focus Entertainment. Set in the Alien universe, the game was released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on June 20, 2023. I saw some people wanted a thread for this and I just beat the game so here is a thread. This is a fun little game, highly recommend $40 or under. It feels like one of those late 90s,early 00's squad tactics games. It has some interesting mechanics, world persistence, RNG events, and RPG elements. The devs just released a big bug clearing patch and also allows you to turn off the doomsday clock if you wanna gently caress around with the RNG events and squad building so nows a good time to hop in. This one is by the guys who did Battlefleet Gothic which is also available on steam and that game was very good as well.
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Aug 16, 2023 02:13
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| # ? May 9, 2024 19:49 |
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My thoughts after messing around with it for ~45 hours and beating the campaign on medium: Difficulty wise: Medium is not that hard, the biggest issue I had was with some of the bugs and gameplay mechanics like not being able to tell a specific marine who you want to do a game saving action to loving move a foot to the left so you get the LOS you need. Other than that I passed the campaign without needing more than 1.5 squad of marines to run on the regular and with 14 days left on the doomsday clock. Didn't lose anyone in the campaign. If you want a challenge bump up the difficulty for sure. The mission counter mechanics: There are 2 things that act as motivations to deploy vs gently caress around in your base. The first is the infestation level of the planet, which increases the number of aliens you encounter in the missions. To be frank, I did not really notice the difference between a level 1 infestation and a level 5 infestation (max) so it may be good to gently caress around to your hearts content before the doomsday clock comes into play. The doomsday clock is the threat of some weyu satellites nuking the entire planet as "containment" and it gives you 28 in game days to finish the game from that point. Having the ability to run your squads tirelessly, completing missions in 1 deployment, or having multiple squads makes the limit not too bad. Gameplay: The game has a "hive activity" mechanic where if you start fighting aliens you get into a hunted mode that increases the difficulty of the level, interspersed with events based on your increasing threat such as having to a standoff against a horde or a big gently caress off alien appearing on the map. This lends the gameplay to be more about sneaking around and using your traps and special abilities rather than loving poo poo up with your smartguns and pulse rifles. Not that big a fan of that loop! However you do get plenty of opportunities to gently caress up aliens in specific set piece defenses or infinite horde slog moments. That more than made up for the times I inched my way across a map laying mines and sniping everything to keep out of alarm mode. RPG stuff: The RPG elements come from recruiting and levelling up marines. Each marine has an undesirable trait which runs from non-impactful (start with 1 less health) to very annoying (kleptomaniac steals 20% of the resources you gather on a mission) to management required (various traits give your marines stress which makes them worse at fighting). Every level up you get a choice of a random trait (unless your marine is stubborn and picks their own!) and at level 3 you can choose between 2 random classes to assign the marine. Game Play Tips Medic & Squad Sarge are the most important classes for overall squad effectiveness. You get guns later in the game that are as effective as a smartgun and can be taken as any class, and the medic's ability to keep your squad stress free and to heal passively when resting is clutch. Sarge offers more command points and generation which is also important as abilities are the key to success. Recon & Gunner are great but not "essential" - I personally ran with multiple gunners once the squad size increases. Its important to have 1 recon with the silencer (get this ability first) on the sniper to pick off enemies without alerting while sneaking around the map. You can snipe a dude next to his buddy and it won't trigger any response. The gunner is best to pack with as much ++"accuracy" attributes and upgrades as possible. The techer is not that useful and you can get an attribute called "smartass" that gives you access to hacking on any other class marine. Your APC has a gun and it will shoot enemies, so driving your APC around to new points to make a "base" to fall back to or draw enemies to is important. Your command points are infinite they just require time to regenerate. This means you can go around planting mines across the entire level while sneaking around and let them do all the work. Or you can snipe an entire room of enemies 1 by 1. Or use the pulse rifle grenade launcher to blow up a clutch of eggs. As long as you get all the eggs in 1 shot you won't alert the enemy. Mines and flamethrower are pro weapons to pick up sooner, as flamethrowers let you create chokepoints to funnel enemies into your mines and sentry guns. You can use your command points to set motion trackers, such as around your APC, and then activate them to draw enemies away from your squad and to the motion tracker to get gunned down for free by your APC. You don't get XP from killing enemies only completing objectives so theres no reason to care about killing enemies. The best attribute to pick when leveling a marine is the one that makes them immune to TIRED. This means they can't be made tired even by events that make your marines tired and you can just run them back to back to back missions as long as they dont get injured and you don't have enough doctors. After that its the one that gives you more CP. After that its anything accuracy related or resourceful (++ammo when resting). The one that reduces your trauma passively is good too. By the end of the campaign I had a sarge, medic, recon, and 2 gunners immune to tired so I completed the last 3 missions on consecutive days. The 2 best early upgrades for your marine are pouches (hold more stuff) and aimsights (accuracy++), after that to me was the: Radio for Sarge, Accuracy on gunner, Silencer on Recon, Drone on Techer, and Reanimator for Medic (all medic ones are pretty even). Gunner can skip the upgrade that turns the smartgun into a sentry and just go for increased mag size (get it last) but the other classes all benefit from getting all 3 upgrades. Jerkface fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 02:35
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I got this game on day 1 and had a blast with it, but I ran into some game breaking bugs at the time (and I was playing on the hardest difficulty with pseudo-ironman rules) so I eventually got kinda fed up. There's been two major patches so far and I'm kind of wanting one more before I dive in. Those were some good patches though. Fixed some of my issues, but man I just don't want to run into anymore things that mess up the run. I love what I've played so far though.
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Aug 16, 2023 05:43
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This was probably my indie goty, so good.
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Aug 28, 2023 07:06
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Seems like they just added Steam trading cards to the game. Some neat wallpapers but not very good for steam profile backgrounds (the art is localized in the center rather the sides)
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Aug 28, 2023 22:39
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This helium room mission is so stupid hard part of me kind of wants to give up. Sometimes this games difficulty is just unreasonable even on normal. Not consistently, but the difficulty is all over the place. This is the first part that is just insanely frustrating though.
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Jan 3, 2024 05:10
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Cool game that continues the cool tradition of including neato xenomorph offshoots like the Praetorian:
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Jan 3, 2024 05:28
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Complained online and beat it the next try. Works every time.
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Jan 3, 2024 05:30
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I actually disagree with the medic being all that important. You might as well run a sarge, a recon and gunners (hopefully someone has smart). If you're taking damage you've typically hosed up and need to evac anyway.
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Jan 3, 2024 13:10
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dogstile posted:I actually disagree with the medic being all that important. You might as well run a sarge, a recon and gunners (hopefully someone has smart). If you're taking damage you've typically hosed up and need to evac anyway. I disagree, as the medic can also help reduce stress which doesnt require taking damage to accrue. While its plausible to so meticulously move through levels avoiding combat or setting perfect ambushes you take even 0 chip damage if you wanted to save time you can play like 25% more recklessly to cut your mission time in like half and then having a medic is great. Like i said i beat the entire campaign with zero marine deaths but i certainly took damage during runs. The game has jank and there are some fights where you will get overwhelmed either by sheer numbers or because theres a big bug that you need to focus on. Having extra HP for the whole squad and reducing stress with medkits was vital to keeping my tireless marines up time. Along with the hospital time decrease. A medic with the pulse SAW is basically a gunner lite anyways. Theres plenty of ways to take chip damage through levels as well, like acid splash or when fighting ranged enemies. Topping up at a rest spot was great, and i liked putting ++ammo on rest on my medics if i got the choice too. You also may not get gunners with strong traits, i didnt get a 2nd gunner recruit that i actually wanted to level until just about half way but i had 3 sarges and 3 medics just due to the random class selection. Jerkface fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 14:12
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Sure, but if I got the choice I'd just go with more damage. The doomsday timer is so forgiving that you can afford to extract. I ended up taking extra armour on most people and that covered it even when I did play more recklessly. Benefit of having more smart guns is that while you're being more reckless, you kill things faster so you're even less likely to take damage unless you let something jump out a vent at you. Game isn't so hard though, so i guess its not important either way. I did the same thing, did the game with 0 deaths. Really appreciated the extra firepower on some of the move and shoot because you're being chased parts
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Jan 3, 2024 18:36
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E: actually gonna whine in another thread lol.
veni veni veni fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Jan 10, 2024 |
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Jan 10, 2024 00:59
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This game was really good for a bit. I got bored and put it down but the initial 10-15 hours or whatever was really fun and absolutely worth the money
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Jan 15, 2024 19:10
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I didn't get bored but quit playing like a week ago for now, because some of the later levels are hard in a really annoying and unfair way imo.The game is sort of awesome but also sort of a mess. A fun game that can also be pretty janky and repetitive with some really questionable design decisions. I'll probably go back to it eventually cause an RTS survival horror game based on Aliens is very cool. Really the whole structure of the game is very unique and I can't make a 1:1 comparison to anything else. I just wish it was better in a lot of ways.
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Jan 16, 2024 08:58
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What did you find unfair/BS? I think the boss fight against the gunship and fighting the corpo guys was pretty annoying. I usually ended up sniping the human enemies because the game clearly wasn't really built as a squad vs squad shooter so the ranged combat wasn't very good.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:19
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I'm on the mission where you have to go into the docked ship underneath the docks level (mission 8?). with the checkpoint I'm on, I have a full squad of 5 level 7ish marines in perfect shape with fully stocked inventory and a wide variety of weapons. I have reloaded it over and over and no matter what I do or what approach I take it seems I just can't win. The game just starts throwing bullshit at me every time. if I stealth to much it'll just send aliens in out of nowhere to spot me (climbing up from under a railing etc.) which will trigger a horde that snowballs out of control. If I try to set up for a fight they just keep coming and coming to a ridiculous degree. Really just find the difficulty curve kind of stupid. The first 5 or 6 missions were probably to easy. But then it just feels like the game stacked the cards against me to have to constantly fight until I eventually just run out of supplies. The awful save system also isn't doing it any favors.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:44
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I think the ship mission is probably one of the hardest in the game. I ended up beating it via liberal use of mines.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:46
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It's Possible I'm just bad at it, but I do feel like I am playing well and using everything I have at my disposal, from motion trackers to turrets and mines placed, trying to play strategically... Nothing works. Literally spent like 2-3 hours on that checkpoint.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:48
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I think I have a dozen trackers set up and the whole place mined to hell and back and it's never enough.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:50
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If thats the Montero mission its probably one of the missions I spent the most pure amount of time playing. Incredibly cramped layout with constant enemy spawns. I think the key is moving fast enough through specific sections so you avoid the patrol loops. There is a room you can weld right before one of the main rooms on the right, I mined that corridor heavily and if I ever triggered an alarm I just ran there and welded which stops the hive activity. Other than that you basically just need to creep forward and recon snipe everyone in your way. There are like 2 or 3 big set piece defenses/battles in that mission where you will unavoidably have a lot of alien activity. I think everything else should be handled by recon+mines. The game will spawn unlimited aliens on patrol so you really just gotta get going.
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Jan 16, 2024 19:06
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Yeah my sniper doesn't have a suppressor which is becoming a big problem. the options for stealth killing aliens is way too limited imo. Basically anything I do starts a hunt. Basically the only other option is motion sensors which are only helpful to a point. I really like how the game feels easy when you have an APC nearby, but increasingly stressful and scary as you stray into more labyrinthian and isolated areas. that's awesome. But the balance feels off to me. When it's hard it often feels more trollish than challenging and I end up getting wiped not because I hosed up, but because the stars just didn't align and the game decided to screw me over.
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Jan 16, 2024 20:28
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| # ? May 9, 2024 19:49 |
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Aye, that mission i found a couple of safe rooms in each areas but i think of all the missions, that's the one that actually took a bunch of deployments out of me. Was the closest i got to a man dying as well. Fantastic mission for making you freak the gently caress out.
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Jan 17, 2024 19:13
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