Alien: Isolation.
I'm sorry, but what a horribly designed game! I'm going into some spoilers here, so consider yourself warned:
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Who the hell designed the plot where the major twist, that of a Alien nest and many many xenomorphs running around is revealed after nearly, what, 20+ hours of gameplay on hard? What I mean is that infamous 'teleporting alien' bullshit. Where I see the alien go around a corner, come out of my hiding spot, and while I'm still tracking the alien being on the other side of the area, a 2nd comes around a blind corner and kills me. And this happens for hours and hours, level after level, with the only reason given by fans is that "The game explains why its unfairly hard"
Here's the thing. As an Alien fan who has read many of the books, seen all the movies and played all the games made in the last few decades, I picked up on the multiple aliens bit easy. I see Alien-A go around a corner, and then see an Alien come down out of the ducts, I'm going to assume that's Alien-B, not a re-spawn of A. Good. Great.
But let me track both! Don't just assume I'm too stupid to realize when multiple Aliens are kicking about until you tell me! And for fucks sake, Ripley! Show a little intelligence! I get that the title is purposefully misleading, being Alien: Isolation, rather than Aliens: Isolation. Again, good. Great. Whatever. But its not like Ripley knows the title. And is it really too hard to believe a survivor saw more than one Alien at a time?
And for the laypeople, those who aren't Aliens fans, this game must seem impossible. If not glitched out the ass, then down right broken. If I never guessed there were multiple aliens, I would swear there was a command code where the alien find and kills you every X minutes or steps, where X is a randomly generated number.
I like challenging games. But the difference between difficulty and challenge is that challenging games dangle success in front of you, daring you to be more creative, faster, smarter, better, and then reward you with attainable, reasonable rewards that advance your progress if you do well. Alien Isolation is just obtuse, with no benefits to progress except more of the same. With an AI that learns from the player's actions, something like new ways to get around the alien(s) would be awesome. As it stands the game slowly takes away options until progress really is just random events generated in a scripted subroutine that sees the alien turn left instead of right, and I find I can't take any sense of satisfaction from that.
And don't talk to me about the motion tracker making noise, sneaking around or using items. Fucking spare me; I know all that. Its still utterly useless. I've never been able to throw a noise maker down one hallway and then sneak through another because why? Why the teleporting alien, that's why. Yes, I know its not REALLY teleporting, but try telling that to my patience. Or asking the terrible save system to give me a freebie because the plot hasn't gotten around to explaining why the game sucks yet. I just love how people use 'oh the plot explains it!' as an excuse for crappy game design. Reminds me of those reviews of FF13 that said it gets good 30hrs in.
