Alien: Isolation - 10 Ways To Create The Perfect Experience

8. Player Ingenuity And Choice

For all its importance in every cinematic instalment of the franchise, one area which the video games have never truly adapted successfully is the sheer degree of ingenuity the heroes needed in order to flee with their lives. With so many based around the colonial marines, the criminally overlooked 1894 Alien video game was the only release to fully embrace the desperation of having no way to fight back and instead requiring tactical thinking. Now Alien: Isolation now has an opportunity to not only deliver a modern take on its strengths but take things a step further. Early information has already confirmed you'll be scavenging resources to build necessities, helping Ripley survive the nightmarish environment within the station. These range from makeshift weapons to help deal with some of the lesser foes which now stalk about the Sevastopol, killing everything in their path, to noisemakers and equipment which might draw the xenomorph's attention to elsewhere in the environment. It's a big step up from before, where the closest many Aliens games got to this sort of personal innovation was setting up sentry guns in certain areas. However, this ability to construct equipment and choices in approach could be taken several steps further in how they complete their mission. There are a wealth of ideas behind this concept alone, each having the potential for a wide variety of choices and some real freedom to plan out an approach. Imagine for a moment if specific items could be used to create booby traps, with corpses or piles of junk set up to set off certain devices. There could be things that attract one type of enemy only to explode, maiming them or drawing the xenomorph down upon their location as a distraction. What has been shown so far is excellent, but it could easily be pushed that bit further to create something truly outstanding and a real game-changer for the whole genre.