Aliens: Dark Descent | Xbox Review

June 9, 2025 Kevin Honigford

Aliens: Dark Descent takes place roughly twenty years after Alien 3. The story revolves around Sergeant Jonas Harper and Administrator Maeko Hayes being thrown into an unusual partnership when things go deathly awry on Weyland-Yutani’s Pioneer station. After surviving the initial disaster, the two of them and a small crew are all that remain. It was then up to me to use their traits and abilities to direct the escape, find any survivors, and if possible, uncover exactly what happened and why.

While the story in Aliens: Dark Descent is compelling and follows the style of the original three Alien films, it also feels a bit “cookie-cutter” for the franchise. After the initial incident played out, I found myself pushing through the story beats as fast as I could just to get to the gameplay, as that was the shining point of this experience.

Fight or Flight

Aliens: Dark Descent plays very similar to your typical overhead tactical team based game, with one major difference: time does not ever completely stop. Aliens: Dark Descent employs a “slo-mo” time sequence, meaning your decisions and tactics have to be played out while things are still moving, albeit at a much slower pace. This really adds to the immersion, making every encounter feel like a life or death experience. If things get too difficult, you can change the slo-mo sequences to actual pauses, but I feel like this is not the way the developers want you to play the game. Throw in the debuffs that every encounter adds to team members, and it really does bring on an almost panic striking situation.

Those debuffs are built into the team building decisions before each excursion. Team members all have a negative trait, and every time I came into conflict with the Aliens, these negative traits took effect and were amplified. It was an unexpected design that really brought the experience home for me. Starting off, my team was confident and cocky, ready to take on whatever I was to encounter. After a few deadly combat encounters, though, the mood had definitely changed, and the voiceover portrayed it beautifully. Before long, my crew was on the verge of a fear-induced meltdown, and hearing the words “Game over, man, Game over!!!” had me in complete frenzy mode.

All of this, coupled with the game’s alien aggression level system, which rises as you progress, made this the first top down strategy game that actually had me moving with the utmost caution. Every bit of the map I traveled could be my last, and at times, I found myself actually wondering if losing a team member was actually going to be worth completing the objective for that level or not. Aliens: Dark Descent succeeds with flying colors at making you feel like you are part of the Alien universe.

Aliens: Dark Descent Final Verdict

Aliens: Dark Descent presents a world that isn’t going to blow you away with graphic fidelity, but what it lacks in jaw dropping set pieces it makes up for with the range of its point of view. Most games in this genre limit you to a limited isometric or over the top vantage point as you explore. Aliens: Dark Descent, however, let me follow as far or as closely as I liked while exploring the dark environments.

Visual and audio environments are very well designed around what the game does, with darkness and fog for sight, and rain or auto-operating machinery influencing audio cues.

Aliens: Dark Descent is an absolutely stellar odyssey into suspense and horror in the RTS genre. I didn’t know what to expect from a game in this format with the Alien lineage behind it, but this one delivered a home run. While the story is a familiar one, where most plot points could be seen from a mile away, the mechanics and environment more than make up for it. The suspense level rises at almost every turn, and the game is, quite possibly, the best I’ve ever experienced with making you feel like you’re actually in their world, desperate to escape.

To hear more about Aliens: Dark Descent, be sure to listen to the June 28, 2023 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast around the 1:20:14 time stamp.

This review is based on an Xbox copy of Aliens: Dark Descent provided by Sandbox Strategies for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation and PC via Steam.