I bet the cell will stand a small monologue

I love the review looking at nuances in the game's mechanics. Even for you, a first-timer to the game, your mind is coming up with strategic nuances to the map being dynamic with shortcuts, loot, gadgets and enemies not respawning. Most people who are new to the strategy genre wouldn't have thought of the dilemmas you brought up, which makes your gameplay/review so much more satisfying to watch.

In regards to the squad wipe thing: I think you made the case excellently. I think squad wipes should definitely be allowed, and if they truly need to be only one time things, it should be explicitly announced the mission is critical or something similar (similar to how in XCOM 1 and 2 there are critical missions, you can't fail or its all over, like base defense, or tower, etc). To a rampant save scummer like me it isn't a big deal, but I can definitely see the point.

My guess for imprisoned cultist was "he will stay there forever because the devs will forget about him".

“Playing video games since the early 90s”!? Damn, Drifter is older than I thought.

Squad Wipes in games like this are important honestly, it gives you a sense of importance to saving your squad and making smart strategic decisions. I also think being able to disable the “Doom Clock” in games like this is always a nice feature to have. Like with XCOM 2 and extending the Avatar Project. It allows you to do a longer,slower paced gameplay in order to truly explore everything the game has to offer instead of being forced to cut corners to meet your deadline

2:05:11 I was at the brink of shitting myself here. From seeing the alien move after you said "everything is fine" to you going "what tha fuck its still alive???", then the alien making that goofy as fuck run as if the fire empowered it was just too much to take at the middle of the night

The cultist in the cell scene btw, you notice? That the doctor literally says that the device the cultist is wearing halts the gestation process of the alien, and then 15 seconds later the chest burster "hatches". I'd look at the Doctor and be like "What were you saying Doc!? Where did you get your degree again?" Ummm yeah, so that dude who locked himself in the room, who you executed, he was actually safe to recruit, he was telling the truth. The only one of the 3 who isn't safe is the guy who you didn't find, who is in the eastern area outside. And you said at the start that doing the mission in a oner is worse, but its actually makes the game easier. Do the first mission till you get a couple of level ups, then fall back, get the ability to lay mines and reduce stress when resting. Go back in, take every mission slow, use plenty of mines and motion scanners to stay away from bugs (if possible, any traits to increase command points help a lot). Doing the missions on one go is easier that repeatedly extracting and going back in. Especially if you have an Sargent that can use command points to freeze stress increase, keep that up as much as possible, especially make sure to proc it and keep it up during hunted phases. The tech is great btw, it is broken in a good way, the drone is great, don't bother upgrading it to weapons cause you always be wasting ammo clips to refill it, its low damage is not worth it. But once it can make noise, you can put your squad in a room and remote pilot the drone, humans will shoot it, but aliens completely ignore it. You can use its make noise ability to lead the aliens to anywhere you want, then you can switch back to your squad and recall the drone who will just make his way back to you on his own. And to anyone wanting to get the no losses achievement, when you get the strategic layer event with the Darwin sympathizer, do not execute him. He goes into your KIA list and prevents you from getting the achievement -.- Oh and ARC - Armored Recon Cruiser and APC - Armored Personnel Carrier. One is ment for small squad recon and one is ment for troop movement. But he APC from the film can field 2 full squads of 8, so the APC in game only allowing 5 is stupid in my opinion. But an optimal playthrough of the game is all about herding enemies away and stealthing through, which is not what we want from an aliens game (except alien isolation, that was awesome). Not a great entry into the aliens universe if I'm being honest. Far too many bugs and silly glitches, Its a technical mess.

Regarding the cell, I give it under an hour. He's certainly not gonna be in there making license plates when the credits roll.

1:23:54 I honestly thought there was just a buff nekkid dude standing in the middle of the command deck. Anyways, thanks for the content! Really nice to see you starting to dip your toes into things outside of the XCOM sphere. I love your style.

I'm sorry ok... I'll try to be a better tech next time, maybe I should use my drone to scout around.

God this was a fun watch. I can understand not wanting to head back into it anytime soon, but I would definitely be interested in seeing you come back to this game sometime in the future. It seems to have a ton of potential, but it wasn't handled anywhere near as well as Alien: Isolation or Fireteam Elite.

To be fair, the reason Mico could throw off the facehugger so easily was that it hadn't actually attached yet - once it's attached to your face, its over.

The cell is not going to hold the cultist for even 1 day

For the ARC vs Dropship thing, it looks like she got lucky and took out the pilot. The two dropships duking it out in open air makes more sense since they are both in their element, compared to a ship sitting with its pilot exposed to a vehicle mounted weapons.

I can't believe that's how the last mission goes. Imagine if in Enemy Unknown you gear up for Operation Avenger, but on the deployment screen Old Central goes HOLD UP COMMANDER I GOT THIS, and him, Shen, and Vahlen assault the fortress themselves. What a hilariously tone deaf game this is. ...And five minutes later it got worse. Only *two* abilities for the endgame squad? Nobody even has anything unique? AND THE DUDES JUST DIE ANYWAY AFTER SWOOPING IN TO STEAL THE SHOW? What a pathetic finale.

You have NO IDEA how long I have wanted you to have a go at this game. If its possible to edit classes then we can have a whole new 'Can you beat X with only Y Class?'

Heh.. Just clicked your video to have some background noise while cleaning, but I ended up watching the whole thing instead =P Started playing A:DD a week ago and can confirm that it's still very glitchy. Not sure if I'll ever finish the game, as I have become pretty casual with age. Wasting an entire evening trying to circumvent game breaking bugs just ain't fun anymore. So thanks for being a trooper and pulling through. And making an honest review.

I’m sure he’s going to realize this later in the video, but if you stealth the missions you don’t increase your stress at all. Combat should be a last resort. As for long missions yea they’re pretty long, especially if you’re stealthing them. I did literally like 75% of dead hills on the first run and the game soft locks you from finishing the map until you go do another mission and come back (thank god because I would’ve ran into a queen way sooner than I was ready for)

The cell is going to last until the end of your sentence, before the cutscene ends 🎉

Cheer up Drifter, at least you can skip cutscenes :P "What kind of sadist introduces a doom clock and then just spams you with events that make deploying on missions impossible?" Ah, reminds me of the stress snowball in the Aliens tabletop RPG 😂 I don't think Maeko is being literal about Price being a synth; I think she's just implying that she's cold and calculating. That said, I was not looking at the subtitles at the time and would've sworn in a court of law that they were both saying 'Simp' xD

Hmm... a totally secure cell eh.... I give him 1/2 a cutscene to get out :)

I say the cell is going to hold the cultist for about an hour.

I think i know what the drone problem is in regards to the little knowledge i have with positioning and loading. You see in starcraft 2 the same sense of trasitioning units and other misc stuff can be interrupted by player action or through cinematics. The game usually records the XYZ positioning of said units allocated to a new position which is how the cinematic worked through intention. But since the drone was not included tell me that the only the soldiers positions were used and not other factors like the drone or companion equippable units. if the maps layout is placed over each other then the fault is the cinematic and would be relatively easy to fix bug when accounting the XYZ positions of "all" units.

About the cell, optimistic estimate is about an hour. Realistic is until near the end of the cutscene.

Paused the video and i give them all of ten minutes.

the cell will hold the cultist for 2 ingame days

I wonder how Drifter drifted all over the aliens

I think a full reviews like this would be fun! I loved your thoughts and agree with lost of them. I think of the Devs spent some time and really refined the game and story, it could've been perfect. Unfortunately, either someone wanted to share their "cool" alien spin off or they lost the plot along the way. I hope they fix it up, I have the game but just don't have thr energy to play it in the state it came out in

APC = Armored Personnel Carrier (it looks to be the one from Aliens too). ARC = ... I don't know... I mean, it is definitely Armored R Carrier, but can only guess what the R is. Recon I would say is a good bet.

my biggest issue with the game when i played it was that no matter how hard i looked for the datapack things (i forgot their name, but it's the side objective that gives you lore/messages between NPCs) i could not find all of them, meaning i had to deal with the fact that i would not be able to 100% it if i wanted to be done before being nuked, so i gave up since i'm not really one to 100% stuff anyway, just grabbing what i did find when going through the missions

The cell will keep him for.... Less than 12 hours

How long will that cell contain the cultist? Eh, 5 minutes tops. I love your videos btw! They're great to sit down to and unwind after a long day of work. I am interested to see where your channels goes from here, should you continue to upload videos!

53 minutes- that "You're forced to play the game until the next save point or lose progress, meaning you're stuck forced to play to game's schedule rather than your own" reminds me of that state of decay game that penalized you not playing it constantly because it had the AI and your characters be absolutely braindead and wander off and either get themselves killed or waste a ton of resources or stupid crap that was useless. That one always stood out to me because it wasn't an online only game where it's somewhat expected for there to be events, game modes, and content that were outside player control and happened on the gamedev's schedule/time, but you (usually) aren't *forced* to participate/compete in those events or be punatively penalized for it, or to play at a regular time every day or lose a ton of game progress 1 hour 18 minutes -"It's like none of these people even want to survive." Now you're getting it! They're all doomsday cultists that want to die 1 hour 19-bloody doomclocks, I bloody hate them. Especially combined with the stupid RNG events that can just shut off being able to play the game 1 hour 49-"How long the cell will keep the cultist contained"- -10 minutes, the cell was already broken open before the cultist was even put in it. Though, technically the cultist doesn't escape, he's dead, but the xenomorph escapes instead 1 hr 55 -wow, talk about *awful* game design. Absolutely moronic, and pathetic you have to game the system in ways like moving the APC and blocking its path so it can actually be useful instead of them staying in the damn vehicle for a few seconds until it's done wiping out the surrounding enemies 1 hr 59-'no individual control'-ok, that may be *the* dumbest design decision in the entire clustertruck so far, including the idiotic doomsday clock and the RNG "You don't get to play the game for a while" events 2 hr 4 -"Allowed to deploy instead of a low morale event"- Ah, that's where you're wrong. You still have the low morale event waiting, it's just being delayed slightly 2 hr 7 - "no guards outside its cell"-let alone shooting it when it escaped, they would have shot the arsehole who released the damn thing before he could hit the button 2 hr 12-you don't understand, W.Y. executives seem to have clauses in their hiring contracts that mean they *must* betray everyone in the stupidest possible ways at the stupidest possible times and be complete lunatics 2 hr 23 -wow, seems like the psycho might have finally realized "Huh, you know, I really could have avoided all of this if I wasn't so completely insane and didn't betray my allies for literally no reason." aaaaaand the idiot just...walks away from the psycho when leaving her there, instead of...oh, I don't know, *shooting her* and making sure she can't ruin anything else? 2 hr 39 "The cultists shut off the power and we had no more motion tracker" uhhh....why? It isn't like the motion tracker they were using relied on the power from the buildings/landscape around them... 2 hr 50-the game just breaking repeatedly and then the final area them going "You know that squad you've been building up the entire game? Those guys? Yeah, screw them-here, have some random people, including someone who isn't even a soldier. Those poor, delicate marines you've been training this whole time are having a low morale event and need their beauty sleep. Oh, and you don't get a full squad either-you only get 3 people. Good luck, and screw you!" and then they just kill off the other 2 stooges not 5 minutes later, meaning you're stuck with just the stooge in chief and the plot device girl wow, that was an incredibly awful ending. Just...terrible.

I think I get it now. Dark Descent gameplay is basically Red Solstice 2: Survivors.

At 19:20, being given contrary information isn't inherently bad. It is actually normally a sign of good expansive writing. The question is "Why is it different?" not "They are just breaking the rules", that is as long as there is a legitimate answer. The idea of not making the Motion Sensor a reliable crutch is great, but it needs reasoning. What would make it bad is if there was no reasoning.

I will note, aircraft are generally pretty poorly armored due to being made to be as light as possible in order to actually fly. This would be the same for a fictional dropship, so a pair of larger caliber rotary guns mounted to an APC would do some considerable damage to said dropship especially while its stationary and unable to really maneuver while inside of a hangar bay.

watched through the end, and I feel this is kind of like a Bethesda-syndrome. As in, if the game is interesting enough, there could be modding potential. But there is no cure for the bad story or equally bad mechanics. There was some nice touches here. Killing an enemy without alerting the others. Wished Xcom had that Using your transport evac as a mobile turret instead of an "exit the mission"- type deal. And of course, the obvious, this is an Alien universe. I was very sceptical about this when I saw the teaser trailer. Now seeing your gameplay, I got excited that it mimicked Xcom, and then disappointed simultaneously. They took some notes on Xcom, but missed some vital points. I am still a little curious, if you decide to take it on again; how are the classes balanced? Can they be as much fun as your single class runs on Xcom2? Can you get too OP with one class?

My greatest praise about this game has got to be the back port to last gen condoles Was excellent! I had zero issues that were not also present on the modern versions.

Not what I expected. But. Still fun. I remember playing this game recently too. Wild game. Tho, gotta say Im much more used to RTS than Drift seems to be.

I estimate between 7-15seconds till the escape of the cultist.

Some of the critisism seems harsh, but fair. The bugs in this game really hit you hard, but also I think some of the disappointments comes from expecting an XCom-like experience. The similarities with XCom are mostly in the management outside of combat, but here your squad behaves more like a unit than individual soldiers which makes it a very different style of play, I think. If you ever decide to try again, you might want to try the slow-mo mode instead pause.. (and try spamming the motion sensors and mines more)

So at the end right, the ship's shields let it get past the quarentine. But why? I assume they want us to believe the ships shields were down on their initial exit which is why it went down in the first place, but why would the shields be able to tank the hits to leave? Are the satelites not designed to destroy shields? They're basically worthless for a quarentine if a ship can just tank the hits and leave. Or did they run out of ammo? In which case leads to much worse design questions and renders a lot of the game kinda stupid. They could've just had it so the satellites shut down right after the nuke launch or something at least plausable.

I laughed way too hard at the last hour of this.

One cutscene I bet the cell will be opened one cutscene after the guy is in it

I'll give the cell like... a day. Max.

I bet the cell lasts for the initial scene, then when they turn around he escapes via the massive air vents in the room.

Watching this 2nd time, man it's as funny or even more than the 1st🤣

I noticed you replied to me a year ago I still love your content no matter how long it takes

I understand the squad wipe thing. At this point i was finding the game interesting, made me want to play it. Then this, and i lost most of the interest in it. I like "organic" games ala xcom where you carve your path, and where your latimer is a hero because she pulled an exploit, there every character gets to be one. I hope they get enough money to make a sequel, still, because there are loads of good ideas, the setting of the world is well done, it just needs more refinement. i'd say a better game direction.

Have you tried jagged alliance 3 yet. It's not aliens but the game play mechanics are very close to XCOM 2.

I feel like this game didn't figure out what it was telling on both a game and story level. Everything about this game screams that it should be Left 4 Dead but mission based co-op with AI or friends. Instead it tried to be Xcom-like which I feel like it holds it back especially since it tells us too much.

When will be the next xcom challenge run

cultist in cell for imma guess 10 minuets

2 days before escape

Cultist contained, until you leave for a mission. That my guess

So, what I'm getting here: Story - LOL, seriously weak sauce. Polish - Honestly, for a new game, while definitely glitchy, seems okay. Probably a good number of these issue got bug zapped since, and I've seen way worse. Gameplay - Some great ideas, but also some sucky ones. Overall good, but not great. Hmm... maybe I'll check it out if it gets a good sale, but probably not short of that.

Just gonna comment this here if you're ever gonna do another X com challenge run here is an idea that no one has done can i beat xcom with the behemoth tank mod ,there is very little content on youtube about it. Also love the xcom content and would love to see more .

I like the game but hated the boss fight at the end

Two cutscenes.

1:49:08 Guessing less than 10 minutes Edit: A single mission was around 10 mins right?

> it's Maeko, Stern and the bald guy Well, at least one of them is an accomplished certified violent murderous psychopath! Congratulations on soldiering through this mess. I think it's being mediocre is the worst thing for a game. Bad games at least have a shot of being entertaining and endearing in how cringe they are. If a game is just "eh, whatever", it's just a total waste of time. Also on to syth or not to synth cutscene, it COULD be interesting... If the context was entirely different. Like, take it out of context of what we've been doing through the game - actually pretty good, the gun problem notwithstanding. But in the context of the plot there are just too many contradictions and nothing makes sense. This actually makes me think that different writers worked on different things and didn't really communicate on the context of what they're doing. As for the poor old man Harper situation, it's just so.. new star wars to me. And it's not even the cliché itself that's the problem for me. Like, I'm not some snobbish stuck up media critic, if clichés work - they're fine by me, and the basic idea of the older generation sacrificing them for the newer one, be it out of love, or because they entrust the world and pass the torch genuinely IS moving. The problem is, again, the context, and the lack of established rules of how powers work. We, the players, care for Harper way more than we care for Cassandra, because we spent much more time with Harper. Hell, we didn't spend any time with Cassandra to form any sort of attachment at all! And if she can also control the alien nerds, why in the hell wasn't she doing that? Y'know, while being in close proximity? And her father, on his hospital bed, far away from the action, could? And on the cinematic games and saving situation: in games like GTA or God of War just having a loading mechanic doesn't solve the problems you're expected to solve during the gameplay by itself. But here it does, and that's what's bad. You've mentioned it yourself, it borderline encourages you to play recklessly to scout ahead, take the reload and play perfectly with foreknowledge you've gathered.

i think that cell is not going to last 5miuntes

For how long to hold alien dude bet like 1 cut scene

41:27 the United States military fir one, the military the colonial marines are based on

I wouldn't be able to make it past tutorial segment, because it's so f**n hollywood bad. Also, it is really weird to be in the situation where losing 3 soldiers is worse than losing 4. Not to mention the rest of the arbitrary nonsense. And here i thought X-Com2 is contrived and game-y. 2:05:56 Oh, it seems the rest of the game's plot is also hollywood bad.

This honestly sounds like a XCOM game made by people that hate XCOM lmao

Aliens dark decent was a ok experience. i agree with a lot of what you said. the price tag being 40$ is too high for a game of this quality. I think my favorite moment was when my medic, Emma Webb got hit in a Xenomorph acid explosion. and lost her arm and thinking about it I like to think that the Xenomorph leaped at the squad and Webb threw herself in front of the squad. definitally agree with the take of a Seqaul/spinoff.

Okay, with you for lots of complaints, but gunship vs armored vehicle, not so much. If you confine the air vehicle like it was during that confrontation, disallowing it to use the bulk of its arsenal, yeah, it should get smoked and it did. I don't have any problem. In fact, I would argue it did far better than I would expect as most likely that forward gun wouldn't be designed as an anti-armor weapon, and would more likely be anti-air, or anti-personnel. I know there is this big myth of the A-10 vs Tanks, but in truth it is very ineffective, and this isn't an A-10 anyway. The drop ship probably heavily relies on its missile ordnance to take on bigger targets, not the gun.

Alright, by all logic, the cell would hold, I guess around a few hours if he brought some tools with him, forever if he did not, and no amount of time if he decides to let out his little friend. Now, I have not watched all that many alien movies, but I have read a lot of alien books, and the Aliens have always either ignored the synths, or did not see them as prey. This changed however, if the synths started to attack them. It makes (a little)sense you cannot use synths of your own, as the aliens would figure out what is going on. so yeah, that is my argument for the synth thing. It was probably done for game instead balance tho.

5 seconds

Regarding the cell. 2 minutes. Tops. Also. This game is SOMEHOW worse than Midnight Suns. Guess Disney's anti midas effect touched this game too. [Yes. They own Aliens. I'm not joking]

generic comment for algorithm

Most problems you had with this game are correct, but the part about the lack of randomness in favour of the game being more cinematic is not. No, games were not made to be dynamic, or different, not necessarily. Video games, like all games, are meant to be fun. Not all games will or should be rouge-likes or have rouge-like elements. A game where the aspect of replayability is sacrificed in favour of better visuals, story, gameplay or cutscenes, can be just as fun. Games that are less random are more consistent. The map is the same, you know what to expect once you have experienced it, but you cannot predict what will happen nex from some sort of pool of pre-made options. This is not a bad thing or a good thing, it is simply different. And for this universe in particular, it would make more sense to have a specific, well crafted story instead of a more free range game. The quality of the story is in question, but the fact of the matter is that Alien movies always has some sort of a powerful emotional and mysterious story for the viewer to follow. Doing anything else but crafting(or trying to craft) a singular, concrete masterpiece would go against the spirit of the franchise. Tho, to be honest, this game has quite a few issues, ad then some rough edges, and questionable design decisions, so it might have been for the best if it stayed in the oven for a year or two longer. I... love this franchise, the cult is such an interesting idea. I wish it was better. I wish this game was better.

Acwthually the synthetics being ignored comes from the movies. Granted, it was stupid then as it is now but the games didn't come up with that stupidity.

how long the cell is going to keep the cultist contained? one thousand milliscecond