Alien Isolation is set in 2137, 15 years after the events of Alien and 42 years prior to Aliens. You play as Amanda Ripley, who is investigating the disappearance of her mother, Ellen Ripley, who we already know from the Alien movie franchise. Amanda is transferred to the space station Sevastopol to find the flight recorder of the Nostromo, the ship her mother was aboard when she was attacked by the Xenomorphs (that’s the name of the alien species in the movies/game). This discovery leads her to believe an alien has terrorized the station and killed the vast majority of the crew. It is now up to you to survive this horror and do whatever it takes to make it from one minute to the next. Assuming you have seen the Alien and Aliens movies before, you are already screaming at the TV ‘DON’T GO IN THERE!’ Amanda is unaware of the true devastation and turmoil her mother went through, so she is trying to solve the mystery of what happened to this vast space craft, still home to a few skittish crew members struggling to survive. Although these last few humans are the least of Amanda’s problems, completely oblivious of the horror she is about to step into.

People have said that true survival horror is a dying breed and, in my opinion, this was brought back marginally by The Evil Within (Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami’s latest release) but that was until I played this game and a new bar was set. Alien Isolation is essentially a stealth, survival horror game. You don’t have an arsenal of weapons or, in actual fact, any real guidance to help you, all you are going to want to do for the games 19 hours of gameplay is SURVIVE! Which is really hard.

Along the way you may be lucky enough to find useful items which can be used to assemble health kits, which do very little, a maintenance jack, or your most important asset – the motion tracker. This is your, slight, saving grace as it allows you to see the vague whereabouts of nearby entities, whether that be a friend or foe. Either way, it at least means you have a slight chance to try and run away from those big scary bastards. Eventually you will find guns but this isn’t exactly a step in the right direction because guns make noise, noise attracts aliens and aliens equals death and death in this game can suck hard balls because, like Dark Souls, the save points are very few and far between and you’ll watch all that work you just put in disappear in an acid melting, gut pulverising instant.

I’ll be the first to admit that the game isn’t perfect, there have been a few small glitches reported from numerous players, including saves being wiped and Xenomorphs appearing out of nowhere, also the secondary characters are very forgettable and two dimensional but these issues took a back foot for one BIG reason, the near perfect visual recreation of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Everything about the game just looks spectacular. It has kept that dated ‘This is what the future will look like’ from a 1970/80’s point of view and that makes the game so charming, or as charming as a horror game can be. But what the game nails so perfectly is the atmosphere. It is constantly tense and the atmosphere is heightened by the phenomenal score, becoming overwhelmingly fast paced and dramatic in heated escapes and then going eerily quiet when you really don’t want it to, just knowing there will be something terrible right round the next corner. To add to this, the game has some perfectly executed jump scares, ranging from random clunks of metal falling from the air ducts and steam pipes going off when you least expect it. I can confidently say that I never played this game sitting back, I was on the edge of my seat and transfixed for every tense second.

Alien Isolation has perfectly encapsulated the tense and gritty atmosphere that the Alien franchise is famous for, it gave us a character that we actually care about because we can see so much of her mother in her and Alien fan boys will know just how much of a badass she really was. We walk with her every second of her journey, hoping the next save point will be just through the next door just so we can help her through the next hour of this hell she’s been put in. If you want an amazing score and unbelievable art direction, buy this game. If you want tense gameplay where you never know what will be around the next corner, buy this game. If you don’t have spare pairs of pants that you can change into every hour then stop what you are doing, buy a big bag full and buy this game because trust me, you are going to need them.