Alien: Isolation Review: Everyone Will Hear You Scream.

When asking what the best Alien video game is, I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who would not say Alien: Isolation.
Released all the way back in 2014, the game is often praised as one the greatest survival horror experiences of all time.
It is also well known for its controversial IGN review, where the reviewer only rated it 5.9 out of ten.
Well, after first playing Isolation years ago, I found myself having a much more positive reaction, and my opinion on the game has only improved in the years since.
So, after watching in excitement as the sequel was revealed at Summer Game Fest, I decided to do another playthrough, but this time on Hard Mode since I’m still too scared to do a Nightmare playthrough.

Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to play through the game on Nightmare… but not today.

Alien Isolation follows Amanda (voiced by Andrea Deck), the daughter of iconic heroine, Ellen Ripley.
After learning the flight recorder from the Nostromo has been recovered and taken to Sevastopol Station, Amanda travels there to hopefully find some closure.
Instead, she finds herself facing the same nightmare her mother experienced because a Xenomorph stalks the ship, determined to hunt her (and, by extension, YOU) down.
The story and characters of Alien: Isolation are pretty simple.
Nothing spectacular but they get the job done.
They are not the game’s selling point; the titular Alien is.
Over ten years later, this game is still famous for the creature’s AI.
It is programmed to be given hints about where you are on the map and constantly adapts to your escape or distraction strategies.
The Xenomorph also kills you immediately if it catches you, and all of these things combine to create one of gaming’s most terrifying stalker enemies.
I accidentally walked into the Alien at one point, resulting in me screaming like a child, firing my gun at it in a panic (even though I knew it would do nothing), ending with this being the last thing Amanda Ripley ever saw.

Prepare to die a bunch to the Alien, especially on harder difficulties.

Way back in 1979, Ash described the Alien as “the perfect organism.”
Well, Creative Assembly certainly replicated this with the Xenomorph in their game, and they deserve all the praise for it.
There are so many iconic cat and mouse moments in this game, from the medical wing, to the trap, to that god damn long hallway.
The Alien is not the only enemy, however, for there are also humans and androids
The humans are easily dealt with for the most part, but the Working Joes are another matter.
They take a lot of hits to kill on Hard Mode, and you almost always risk alerting the Alien when fighting them.
I cannot imagine what it would be like on Nightmare Mode.

The Working Joe’s also have that uncanny valley look, which adds to the fear.

That being said, it is also with the Working Joes where some players’ criticisms come in.
There are a few chapters in the game where you are only fighting androids, and some consider this to be the weakest part of the game.
I know I felt that way when I first played but, in my recent playthrough, I actually had a lot of fun finally having the freedom to take these guys down, without having to worry about the Alien dropping down and instantly killing me.
What I will not praise, however, is the space-walking segments.
There are three in the game, and the first gets a pass because we are exploring an interesting area.
The other two, however, are extremely tedious, and you move at a snail’s pace so that certainly does not help.

The nostalgia of visiting the ship from the first film is one of this section’s only saving graces.

At the least the visuals during these brief moments are still great.
That is another thing to praise the game for because the graphics have aged fantastically.
While the NPCs do look a little flat outside of cutscenes, the environment is flawless and a perfect replication of the environment from the original Alien.
It is no wonder this game inspired Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus.
Isolation is a fantastic video game.
While the story is basic, the graphics are excellent and the AI for the titular Alien is out of this world, making for a both terrifying and very difficult game.

The challenge is part of the experience in *Alien: Isolation.*

In space no one can hear you scream, but I am sure the neighbours heard me screaming in terror while I played this game.
I am both excited and afraid to finally get my hands on the sequel after all these years.
Alien: Isolation is certainly not a 5.9.
It is one of horror gaming’s greatest terrors.

Alien: Earth Review: In Space No One Can Hear You Scream About Bad Endings.

The Alien series has had a resurgence with the recent success of Romulus, and the newly released Alien: Earth developed by FX.
Created by Noah Hawley, Alien: Earth is set a few years before Ellen Ripley had her first encounter with the iconic and terrifying Xenomorph in the original movie.
The corporation known as Prodigy, run by the declared “boy genius” Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), is experimenting with immortality, attempting to transfer human consciousness to android bodies.
Their first test subjects are a group of terminally ill children, whose minds are transported into the adult bodies, before they are given new names based off characters from Peter Pan.
At the same time, a Weyland-Yutani ship carrying five invasive species from different planets, including the Xenomorph, crashes on Earth in a city owned by Prodigy.
Wanting to recover the subjects, and test out his new toys, Boy sends the children to retrieve Yutani’s property, led by Wendy (Sydney Chandler).
However, Wendy has her own goals, wanting to rescue her brother Joe (Alex Lawther), who has been sent on a rescue mission to the crash site, unaware of the monsters that lurk inside.

Wendy’s goal is to protect her brother, but she encounters many terrifying monsters along the way.

Alien: Earth has a fantastic premise, and I was very intrigued to see how it would all end when I started watching.
The show definitely leaves a great first impression, with gripping commentary on what makes someone human and the dangers of corporations, while also having awesome Alien content.
The Xenomorph is an absolute menace in the first few episodes, as it wreaks bloody death upon all it encounters.
That is not to sell short the other newly introduced alien species in this show because they all have horrifying ways of killing their victims.
By far my favorite (and I am sure a lot of other people’s favorite) new alien is the T. Ocellus, a parasitic species, which rips out its host’s eye and then takes its place, controlling the body from there.

I hope we see more of T. Ocellus in the *Alien* series.

The practical effects and the CGI for these aliens, both old and new, are all great.
Just as amazing are the performances, across the board.
The actors for the hybrids, Wendy, Slightly (Asah Gourav), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), Nibs (Lily Newmark), Curly (Erana James), and Tootles (Kit Young) all do fantastic jobs of portraying children transferred into adult android bodies.
Samuel Blenkin is also perfectly detestable as the narcissistic Boy Kavalier.
I spent most of the show just wanting to punch his smug smile.

And will someone get this man some goddamn shoes? What is this show, directed by Quentin Tarantino or something?

However, my favorites of the cast are definitely Timothy Olyphant as the android Kirsh, and Babou Ceesay as the cyborg Morrow, with the two of them having an excellent rivalry throughout the show.
Morrow is especially excellent, given his time to shine as the star of Episode Five, which is the best of the series so far.
Although, one criticism that you could level towards this episode is that many of the characters (excluding Morrow) are monumentally stupid.
But, hey, I guess if they were smart the aliens would have never got loose and there would be no story.

Morrow is the only smart guy in a ship full of idiots.

Unfortunately, I have what I feel are far more valid criticisms as the show progresses.
First of all, there is Wendy.
I like her and think she is a well written character.
The issue I have is that she is ridiculously overpowered, especially for an Alien story.
She has multiple incredibly powerful abilities, and it is never explained how she got them.
Thus, when the final episode rolled around, I held no fear for her safety because I knew she could power through whatever threat she faced.

Wendy absolutely needs to be powered down if Season Two is going to have any stakes.

She and the android hybrids are definitely the main focus of the series, which is my second criticism.
This show is called Alien: Earth after all, but the aliens definitely play second fiddle to the hybrids, with the Xenomorph being less threatening by the end as a result.
Finally, there is the last episode of the season, where nothing is resolved and it ends on a massive cliffhanger, which we will probably have to wait years to follow up on.
Going into Alien: Earth, I thought it was going to be a limited series.
I honestly think I would have preferred it to be so.
Then we would have a complete story where the conflict is resolved.
Instead, we got a finale with multiple issues and a cliffhanger ending which delivers no satisfaction for lingering questions.

The first half of *Alien: Earth* is way better than the second.

Ultimately, I will still watch a second season if it happens.
I am invested in the characters and creatures, so I want to know what happens.
That being said, I hope they learn from the mistakes of the first season and make Wendy less overpowered, put the Aliens forefront and, for the love of god, offer some resolution with their ending this time.
I recommend Alien: Earth but definitely be prepared for disappointment with the way it concludes.

Alien: Romulus Review: Great Moments Weighed Down by Nostalgia.

Despite being the most renowned sci-fi horror franchise of all time, the Alien sequels have yet to live up to the excellence of its first two installments.
This was something I hoped would change with Alien: Romulus.
Directed by Fede Álvarez, one of the best horror directors working today, the first teaser for the film truly gripped me, getting me more excited for an Alien movie than I have been in years.
So, the first chance I got, I made my way down to the theater and sat down to watch it.
Unfortunately, I left that theater disappointed.
That is not to say Alien: Romulus is a bad movie, don’t get me wrong.
But the film is simply no better than the many average sequels which came after Aliens.
There are times when the movie is great, but those moments are undermined by a lot of bad.

*Romulus* starts off well, but its issues become more apparent as the film goes on.

Set between Alien and Aliens, Romulus follows a group of young adults who board a deserted research station.
Consisting of Rain (Cailee Spaney), her android brother Andy (David Jonsson), Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Bearn) and Navaro (Aileen Wu), this group attempts to find a way to make a better life for themselves, only to be met with a brutal fight for survival as they encounter the most dangerous creature in the universe.
Out of every character in the cast, the best are definitely Rain and Andy.
Their bond is the highlight of the film, with David Jonsson being particularly great as Andy.

Jonsson makes Andy endearing, awesome, and off-putting at different points throughout the film.

As for the rest of the characters, they are fine.
A lot of them are just there to die horribly when things go bad.
Speaking of which, these deaths are really gruesome, with a lot of horrifying practical effects.
The effects for the Aliens are also top notch.
They have been mostly CG for the past few movies, so it was great to see Fede Álvarez return the franchise to its practical roots.

Turns out the Alien is much more threatening when it is actually on stage with the actors. Who would have thought?… okay, everybody already knew that.

Along with the practical effects, the set design is also phenomenal, as is the sound design.
The soundtrack is nothing special, but it gets the job done.
All of these settings combine to create some truly great scenes, most notably with the Facehuggers.
Romulus presents the Facehuggers at their most terrifying, while also adding to the lore of how they operate in fascinating ways.

The Facehuggers have not been this scary since *Aliens.*

All of this is great but, as I said earlier, the movie is weighed down by many problems, chief among them being nostalgia.
Whenever a franchise gets rebooted nowadays, the writers will often have characters repeat famous lines from earlier movies, even when those lines make no sense in the context they are repeated.
Romulus is unfortunately no different.
There is an action scene near the third act which is tense, inventive and one of the best scenes in the film… but then they have to weaken it by having a character awkwardly repeat a line from Aliens.

This scene would have been perfect without the unnecessary callback at the end.

The issues do not end there because, without giving anything away, the movie baits nostalgia using CGI for one specific plot point, and it was just awful.
It looked so bad to the point of distraction, especially compared to the many great practical effects throughout the movie.
And then we have the ending.
Oh, boy, that ending.
Going into Romulus, I had heard that the ending was nuts and yep, it definitely is, but not in a good way.
It starts off well enough, being sufficiently creepy.
However, as the scene goes on, the threat just becomes goofy.
It felt like I was looking at something from a cheesy Resident Evil game rather than something from Alien.

The third act will be divisive, I think. Some people will enjoy it, while others, like me, will not.

I can appreciate Fede Álvarez taking a big swing with his idea for the ending, but it definitely missed for me.
Not to mention this final threat feels extremely similar to an idea from a prior Alien sequel which already failed.
It is a shame that Romulus has all of these issues because, like I said, there are a lot of great things about this movie.
Rain and Andy’s bond is a highlight, the practical effects are amazing, and a lot of the horror and action scenes are intense.
It is all just weighed down by eye rolling nostalgia bait, extremely poor CGI at times, and a third act which just feels goofy and honestly too far removed from Alien.
Overall, Alien: Romulus is still a good movie, but best to temper your expectations before going to see it.