I'm a long-suffering fan of the Alien franchise. With few exceptions, the games made within the universe have been shoddy at best. When Aliens: Dark Descent was announced, I had the same reservations. As has been the case many times before, they always sound promising until the game is released, and they turn out to be an unenjoyable mess. This game, however, is not an unenjoyable mess.

Aliens: Dark Descent is the best Aliens game released within the last 20 years.

I feel like the problem with most games of the franchise is that their entire development starts with little more than the thought of how to give players a pulse rifle and let them play shoot-'em-up with xenomorphs. I can only imagine that the development of this game started and centered around a completely different set of gameplay elements. You are the commander of a group of badass Colonial Marines in a tactical squad-based setting. Your job is to carefully lead them and manage their stress and resources while they sling lead during their own close encounters.

The plot follows two main characters. Originally, it centers on Maeko Hayes, who is a Weyland-Yutani employee and the deputy administrator aboard Pioneer Station, which is in orbit above the planet Lethe. A mysterious shuttle lands aboard the station and unloads some containers, which are intentionally opened by rogue dockhands. The bad news is that these containers have xenomorphs inside, and the station is almost immediately taken over by the creatures. To contain the creatures and stop the now-escaping shuttle, Hayes activates the Cerberus Protocol. This activates a ring of satellites around the planet that immediately open fire on anything in space around the planet. Unfortunately, this also includes the Colonial Marine frigate, Otago.

Before the protocol is engaged, the Otago sends a dropship with a USCM squad led by officer Jonas Harper. The marines rescue Hayes from the station but can only watch as the Otago gets pummeled by missiles fired by the satellites. The Otago loses power and goes down, crash-landing hard onto the surface of Lethe with the dropship following it. It isn't a total loss, but the crash wipes out the command of the ship and much of its functionality, and upon landing the dropship within the hangar, Harper finds that he is now the acting commander of the frigate.

In its downed state, the Otago serves as the base of operations for Hayes and Harper. They discover that what happened aboard Pioneer Station was not an isolated incident, and the various outposts on the surface of Lethe have had similar occurrences. It is up to them and the crew of the Otago to save as many people as they can and deal with a planet that is rapidly being overrun with the xenomorph threat.

The use of the Otago as a base can be considered similar to how you run a base within the modern XCom games. While progression through early parts of the campaign unlock new rooms and functionality aboard the Otago, you don't actually construct rooms. Instead, you use the Otago to manage how you promote and enhance your marines, treat their injuries, reduce their mental trauma, and plan out deployments.

When you deploy a squad, you choose which marines will be in the squad and their loadout. At the outset, all your marines are only Privates, and with experience, they can be promoted to unlock upgrade slots and specialize in a class. Sergeants generate command points and manage squad stress, Gunners use the smart gun and lay waste to enemies, Teckers hack door controls and use a drone to do various tasks, Medics heal wounded marines more quickly and provide benefits during rests, and Recon engages targets at range.

For loadouts, you have access to little more than a primary weapon (pulse rifles), a secondary weapon (pistols), and a special weapon (shotguns). As you progress in the campaign, you'll acquire materials that can be used to unlock new weapons, at which point you effectively have an unlimited supply of that type. As an example, in games like Phoenix Point, you need to use resources to create every rifle; in Aliens: Dark Descent, once you unlock the smart gun, any gunner can use them, and you can use as many as you have in your squad.

For your first deployment, it's a bunch of Privates with basic gear, and you're sending them to a colony that doesn't seem to be too healthy. Sure enough, it has been overrun with xenomorphs, and your trusty motion tracker (integrated into the minimap) shows where they are. This is an Aliens game, and your first instinct is to send your squad of badasses and rid the map of xenomorphs. This is also a bad idea for a few reasons, the first of which being that as you kill them, more spawn in a never-ending cycle from various entry points throughout the map.

Any time your marines are detected by a xenomorph, it begins the hive response, which starts off easy but ticks toward higher difficulty for as long as you are either detected or the hive is hunting for your squad. Lay low inside rooms or by hiding behind cover, and the hunt will eventually be called off, but the response will slowly escalate the entire time. After a set amount of progression that you can see in the response's timeline in the upper right, special events trigger. The first type is a massive outbreak, in which a larger number of xenomorphs swarm your position and you must dig in at a good location to not get overwhelmed. The second type is that a pair of stronger xenomorphs spawn and roam the map. These events repeat as the response escalates.

It makes subtlety and discretion a significant part of the gameplay, which is incredibly refreshing for a game of the franchise. Later, you gain abilities that let you take out individual enemies without triggering detection, but early on, you're better off trying to avoid combat as much as possible as you navigate the levels to collect tools, med kits and materials in addition to completing objectives. Even in the late game, when your squad has enough firepower to lay waste to the population of a small moon, you'll still be laying mines and using suppressed sniper shots to eliminate key enemies so you can avoid detection.

You can't always avoid combat, and sometimes, you'll make mistakes and get spotted. The higher the response gets, the harder the level becomes. Additionally, your squad's stress level gets higher any time it engages in combat or a hunt is ongoing. Stress has three levels, and upon reaching level two, a marine gets a significant random debuff. Let stress get even higher, and they'll get a more powerful version of that same debuff, at which point the combat effectiveness of that marine is significantly compromised. Sergeants get abilities to mitigate stress, but the best way to deal with it is to allow the marines to rest.

If you find a room marked with a green "house" icon on the map, your squad can enter the room and spend a tool for each door that needs to be welded shut. Once all doors are welded, the squad can enter a rest period. By default, this immediately stops any hunt in progress (and thus the escalation of the hive response), all marines lose a full level of stress, and some other benefits. Various classes of experienced marines can offer benefits to rest periods via their perks, such as gaining additional ammo or further reducing stress levels. While tools can be provided at the start of a deployment or found within the level, they are a finite resource, so even if a resting room has one door and is an inexpensive place to rest, it should still be considered.

Crucially — and another aspect of Dark Descent that I adore — is that you don't need to complete a level with one deployment of marines. If the hive response has escalated too much or your marines are wounded and stressed out with a handful of remaining ammo, you can send them back to the APC to return to the Otago. The level remains exactly as it was when you left, so those marines can rest, and you can send a fresh squad on a subsequent deployment to pick up where they left off. By doing so, the hive response also gets reset, so the new squad has a clean slate regardless of how often the previous deployment(s) got into combat or pissed off the locals.

You control the entire squad as a single unit, so if you give orders to walk or run down hallways or take cover, the whole squad does it at the same time. Certain actions, such as unlocking a door or welding one shut, issues the command to the nearest marine, who runs over and performs the action. If it is a specialized action that only certain marines can do, such as hacking a door, it'll be issued to the nearest marine capable of handling the order. It makes controlling the squad incredibly intuitive, and it allows for you as the commander to worry about the bigger tactical picture rather than getting bogged down in micromanaging the actions and orders of individual marines.

Your squad has a number of command points that slowly regenerate on their own, and kills restore a good chunk of them. You can use command points on any special ability that you, a squad member, or their weapons have. Any squad member with a pulse rifle can use a command point to use the weapon's grenade launcher to fling some explosives downrange or use a shotgun to blast anything in a cone of fire. As you vary weapons within the squad or classes of marines, you'll get all kinds of fun abilities. Sniper shots, mines, stand-alone motion trackers to expand coverage of the map, RPGs, and others round out the available tools. You want to have enough command points to get yourself out of sticky fights, but you can always hunker down in a side room and let them regenerate before returning to the potential fray.

There are some bugs here and there. You control your squad as a cohesive group, but they are still individual marines, and a handful of times, a single marine got caught on the terrain, and I'd have to use move orders to get them around it. At one point, I had a key objective bug out completely, but I could load a recent autosave, and it worked fine thereafter. Those issues were the worst of it, and they're obviously small ones. Despite the game's relative complexity and all the gameplay elements involved, Dark Descent juggles everything well.

It took me about 20 hours to wrap up the campaign, and it kept me engaged for the duration. The title has quite a few levels, and each is usually long enough to require a couple of hour-long deployments. At the end of the game, while the story wraps things up nicely, it clearly leaves options for the plot to continue. I'm not sure if DLC is in the cards, but I'd be completely on board with a sequel.

I'm shocked with just how good Aliens: Dark Descent ended up being, and I could hardly put it down from the moment I loaded it up. It clearly respects the Aliens franchise, but it uses the elements in a way that is in service to the gameplay rather than as mere fan service for the player. Its gameplay is not only incredibly fresh compared to the other games of the franchise, but it's also so well executed that it stands as a high point among real-time tactical games, let alone for an Aliens game. Out of the franchise's entire history of games, there are only three games notable for how uniquely good they are; Aliens: Dark Descent is one of them.

Score: 9.4/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 Ti