Text/White Goblin
Games related to "alien", relying on the blessing of "IP" alone often attracts many fans of the series, and they will carefully compare with previous works while playing.
However, this time "Alien: Falling into the Dark" is obviously a little different, because there have rarely been real-time strategy games with the theme of Alien in the past. While cloaked in a sci-fi style, the gameplay experience of Alien: Into the Dark itself does not have the thrill of slaughtering Aliens. On the contrary, its emphasis on resources and personnel management really cost me a lot of learning early in the game.
But I have to say, it's quite fun.
Don't pick up rags
Like most stories, the invasion of Alien always has a cause, and "Alien: Falling into the Dark" is to transport a batch of unknown materials from the outside to the cargo hold, and someone on the planet colony also pulled the corpses of unknown species back from outside, and the protagonist successfully escaped death as the deputy director of the Pioneer Bureau, and also embarked on an adventure with a group of Marine soldiers...
In order to survive, you need to constantly search for more supplies and save more survivors. But even though the people involved in the expedition are elite Marines, they obviously have no previous experience in fighting alien creatures, so it's normal to be a little nervous - based on the character's health bar, "Alien: Falling into the Dark" sets the concept of pressure values for each character.
Whenever an alien monster is discovered during exploration, the character's pressure will continue to rise. It is very logical that no matter how brave normal people are, it is inevitable that they will be nervous when facing monsters.
As the pressure increases, the corresponding debuff effect is randomly given to the character. For example, on weekdays, everyone's hands tremble because of excitement and nervousness, and they are no exception. As these Marines explore, they may experience a decrease in their shooting accuracy due to excessive pressure, or they may become manic and unwilling to follow your commander's orders.
Sometimes there are even various unexpected situations such as falling behind, or because a person has a decrease in shooting accuracy due to excessive pressure, or even is given a "bad luck" debuff (with a high chance of getting stuck when shooting), so that the team's firepower drops significantly, and then loses in an expedition.
Resource management that is difficult to decide
Speaking of which, everyone must be able to judge the degree of influence of the pressure value on the overall activity, and there are no more than two ways to reduce the pressure value: avoid being discovered by the alien as much as possible, and reduce the pressure of the team members through external forces.
The former is easy to understand and naturally less tense without being discovered, while the latter is one of the core settings of Alien: Into the Dark, and it is also a resource management that I myself have always had a headache.
If you want to reduce the pressure on your teammates, you can choose to use tools to close a room and let them rest to decompress, or you can use drugs to decompress. But the price of drug decompression is the loss of medical supplies on which to survive during subsequent expeditions.
It can be said that the existence of pressure values not only affects the character itself, but also affects me as a player - should the enemy in front hide or fight, should you rest here? Is the medicine used to decompress, or to fight the enemy against the debuff.
Mistakes in every link can lead to annihilation, followed by countless reads and repetitions.
If the setting of pressure value makes the difficulty of "Alien: Into the Dark" more than an order of magnitude higher than that of regular real-time strategy games, then the extremely low cost of trial and error greatly reduces the fear of "game over" in players' hearts.
Willing to continue trial and error to adjust the most effective and safe adventure route.
Soldiers who are constantly getting stronger
On the other hand, "Alien: Falling into the Dark" is a real-time strategy game, and the entire exploration process is even more remarkable. Tasks such as collecting supplies and manipulating mechanisms will be randomly sent to complete tasks such as four squads, and as experienced marines, they will also start fighting directly after encountering enemies and being discovered, without the need for the player as a commander to give orders.
The main thing I need to do as a commander is to constantly adjust their position to avoid constant attacks from monsters, and at the same time can turn the bad situation in battle with special skills. For example, only one team member will use grenades and grenade launchers, or rely on heavy fire suppression to slow down the enemy's movement speed, giving other team members more time to destroy the enemy.
In addition to obtaining supplies for each expedition to strengthen the squad, soldiers will also level up when they go out on missions to improve their attributes, and even gain special abilities, such as the ability to unlock "encrypted doors" or provide an additional buff to the team.
As the base upgrades and gradually unlocks mines, flame launchers and other equipment, the squad's combat methods will become more and more diverse.
Sounds like a beautiful setting.
But if it really is all easy and pleasant to pick up garbage except for the pressure limit, I will not lament its difficulty in the front.
Because there's a big problem: Alien: Into the Dark is a dynamic difficulty setting.
Dynamic difficulty, race against time
Every time you send a squad out on a mission, the difficulty will continue to increase after being discovered by the alien, from simple to normal or even difficult, and the alien's attack on this squad will become more and more crazy. This also means that the total time of the squad's expeditions, or the total number of battles, has a soft threshold.
In addition, there may be different negative effects on characters at the end of each exploration. For example, "exhausted", "injured", etc., you need to carefully adjust the base before you can set off again.
Not only that, but there are often various random events within the base, requiring the commander to make his own choices, such as a fight between two recruits, whether to punish one of them or accept criticism together. Different choices bring different effects, and there is no really perfect solution, each option is both positive and negative.
It sounds like a fun setting, but if you combine it with a high difficulty threshold, it's not the same thing.
As mentioned earlier, the strength of the alien's attack will become more violent as the time it is discovered by the alien increases during each exploration. And this "dynamic difficulty" setting exists not only in a single mission, but also in the macro game progression.
The level of infection on the entire planet will become more severe and the difficulty will continue to increase over time.
In other words, players need to make every day as easy as possible: collect supplies, travel to the planet to rescue survivors such as doctors and engineers, and further expand the size of the base.
At the heart of the problem is that every soldier who is exhausted or injured takes two to four days to adjust, which is obviously unacceptable for commanders in a race against time.
How about the solution? Naturally, it is rolled back and restarted.
If you don't get injured, don't you need to recuperate in the medical room?
Even if you can successfully complete the expedition one after another, because a soldier is seriously injured, you need to go back and start again, and try your best to complete the task by mistake.
The setting of double progressive difficulty forced me to sacrifice the "SL Dafa", through trial and error to find the best solution that may exist...
As mentioned earlier, the combat difficulty of Alien: Falling into the Dark is actually not very high. But because of the existence of the lifeline of "time", I still have to constantly read the file and redo it, through the backplane to pursue an optimal solution - this kind of gameplay is really not too wonderful.
summary
To be honest, the gameplay framework of Alien: Into the Dark was quite appealing to me. The random battles of each expedition, as well as the upgrades and construction links inside the base, and the training of different soldiers, all kinds of content are well integrated.
However, the double difficulty progression setting largely limits the player's personal play space, and they will eventually be forced to embark on the road of "SL Dafa" - this situation invisibly makes the many random events and optional battles in the game become less "random".
This design really reduces a lot of fun, you say?