It’s insane to believe it’s been 12 years since the debut of beloved horror cult hit Alien Isolation. Yet, you’d be hard pressed to think Creative Assembly has missed a beat in the years since, considering the confidence on display with our first look at Alien Isolation 2.
Set a few months after the conclusion of Amanda Ripley’s fateful nightmarish journey on the Sevastopol in the original game, Alien Isolation 2 puts you in the shoes of a new character with the last name Blake. Blake is part of a search and cleanup crew from the Weylan-Yutani corporation from the Alien movies, looking for the wreckage of the Project KG348 lab that got ripped from the Sevastopol near the climactic events of the original game. Needless to say, the reason why that lab got ejected to this desolate planet ties really well to Amanda’s actions in the original game, and to why Blake now gets to live her own nightmare with the Xenomorph.
In the hands-on demo I got to play during Summer Games Fest, I was so pleased at how immediately I got to acclimate to this sequel, especially having just experienced the original game for the first time in its entirety this past Halloween (let me tell ya, it held up spectacularly). Even now running on Unreal Engine 5 instead of Creative Assembly’s custom engine for the original, Alien Isolation 2 just felt right from moment one, but now with the expected leap in visual fidelity while still retaining the attention to detail that’s made the original one of the most visually sumptuous games of its era.
The big thing that differentiates this sequel from the original reminds me a bit of when we went from the original Alien movie to the sequel Aliens. Whereas the original game unfolded entirely in the Sevastopol, the early parts of the 30-minute hands-on demo has you out in an open environment in the planet LV-921. While being out in something more open can be cause for concern in regards to how it can retain the claustrophobic feeling of the original, what we played didn’t quite give me an impression one way or another if it adds or detracts from the experience. Creative Assembly has promoted that this sequel will divide its time between you exploring the labs in this planet alongside gameplay out in the open. Whether that balance pays off in the full game, at least from the early demo, being out on LV-921 was a great flex for the new visuals, and served as a slow build up to reaching the Project KG348 lab, where once you go in and you get locked inside, the classic Alien Isolation gameplay loop returns in full force.
It was cool going through this environment again and seeing it perfectly recreated from when last I played through it in the original, but the highlight was certainly getting to face off with the Xenomorph again, and he’s just as astute and terrifying as ever, if not more terrifying. Creative Assembly’s creative director had prefaced our demo saying we would not get any of the items you got late in the first game to fend off the Xenomorph (boy did I miss not having a flamethrower), so instead we would have to try to use our own improvisation and wits to survive this demo.
One of the small changes I noticed is how scavenging you do that previously gave you the scraps for crafting can now be used to repair things in the environment, thus opening shortcuts that could help later on. I see how that could potentially leave you with nothing to fall back on should you run out of looting materials to craft items, which will absolutely add to the tension. I talked with others in the session that decided not to invest on a door that to me was a literal life saver to proceed, so I’m excited for the more wide opportunities this seems like it will provide.
As for the Xenomorph itself, considering the original is still one of the greatest marvels of adaptive AI engineering I’ve ever seen in a game, I’m happy to report this scumbag is just as intelligent as I remember, and now this sequel has seemingly made it even more intelligent. I died to the Xenomorph many times, and I nearly soiled myself the moment I saw it will now constantly find you inside vents that used to provide some safe respite from what I remembered in the original. This tells me Creative Assembly will now turn the original’s bag of tricks for your survival into its head, and I’m quite curious to see how that unfolds when the full game comes out.
The demo ended right as you are trying to get out of this lab, and gave us no indication of anything else like combat or the like. While the demo shows that Creative Assembly still understands what made the original so strong, I’m also curious to see if they address some of the pain points of the original, like forced combat encounters in a game that de-emphasized combat, and going a bit longer than it needed to.
But those are things we’ll learn whenever this long awaited sequel eventually comes out, which could be tomorrow considering the level of polish in display already. Whenever it launches, look forward to more coverage for Alien Isolation 2 to come!
