Aliens: Dark Descent

[Eyestabber]

Good thing we have THE SLOWEST CAR IN THE FUCKING GALAXY to move around. If only the game wouldn't randomly cancel my orders it would actually be somewhat playable. But no. Whether it's a grenade or a simple "get in the car and fucking move", you don't give orders in this game, they're more like polite suggestions that your units may or may not follow. Fucking Starcraft has way better combat than this, and we're comparing a wannabe nu-Xcom-but-in-real-time-with-pause to a real strategy game. And whenever you open your actions menu you can no longer see status and ammo. WHO THE FUCK DESIGNED THIS CRAP? Holy shit, action bars have been around for decades in games like this and yet the galaxy brain devs of this game managed to fuck things up. Reloading is also a chore, one missclick and the entire squad reloads, instead of just the one guy who is low. Tactical options are both very limited and very wonky. Their effectiveness is directly tied to how fast the game decides to obey your commands this time.

Starcraft released in 1998, maybe the devs should've checked that one out.

[rusty_shackleford]

This any gud?

[Boontaker]

This any gud?

I enjoyed it, it's real time X-COM

[Gregz]

This any gud?

I enjoyed it, it's real time X-COM

And that's the problem.

This could have been a great game with just a few different gameplay/feature design choices. My biggest gripe is that you can't meaningfully pause combat or control your individual marines. Yes, the squad behaves relatively intelligently, but not enough to combat the difficulty of the various scenarios that the game throws at you, which is all by design. The underlying design philosophy is to frustrate and stress the player. That works very well in a movie (Aliens), but gets old really fast in a video game. Any game that steals agency from me can fuck right off.

[Eyestabber]

Woah, that's a big 180º @Gregz. But I agree with your (new) opinion.