The absolute worst thing in Aliens: Dark Descent isn’t an alien, but the timeline in the top-right of the screen – or as I like to call it, Satan’s Fast Forward Button. In this scrappy but compelling top-down tactics adaptation from Battlefleet Gothic: Armada developer Tindalos Interactive, you lead up to four Colonial Marines around labyrinths of corridors, flaming wreckage and sealed rooms, completing missions of the “activate the generator” variety while fending off – or preferably, avoiding – xenomorphs of all sizes and degrees of canonicity.
Aliens: Dark Descent reviewDeveloper: Tindalos InteractivePublisher: Focus EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 20 June on PC (Steam), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.
Armed with battle rifles, Smart Guns, flame-throwers, grenade launchers and, of course, shotguns for close encounters, your squad can shut down a single vanilla Alien without too much trouble, providing you master certain basic gambits like back-pedalling while shooting xenos to avoid their acid blood. But alerting one Alien alerts the entire hive, triggering a Hunt phase during which other Aliens home in on your position, while also kicking the aforesaid timeline into motion.
As the timeline advances, it increases the number and aggressiveness of the Aliens roaming each environment. The dots on your motion tracker move faster, switch direction more frequently, and make more spiteful use of the terrain, diving into tunnels to respawn behind you or lurking in vents next to rooms that harbour objectives. The timeline also gradually introduces beefier grades of extra-terrestrial, like the ground-pounding Crusher and the oddly team-spirited Praetorian, which hurries around rallying the other monsters like a D&D hero trying to Gather Their Party.
These points of escalation appear as coloured segments and icons, each creeping insidiously towards the middle of the bar as the Hunt goes on. Above all, you’ll want to watch out for exclamation marks. These initiate an Onslaught, giving you 20 seconds to prep before spawning a horde at the far end of the map. It’s the siege scene from the movie, but you won’t always have the luxury of four walls and an obvious direction of attack (not that those walls helped Hicks and co in the end). For every Onslaught I’ve triggered while lurking in a tidy medbay with a single door I can weld shut and furniture to cower behind, I’ve triggered another while exploring some open space with multiple points of approach, such as a factory floor or, gulp, the depths of the hive itself.