One of those games I really do want to love more but there's too many problems with it I just can't. Not enough enemy variety or boss variety, the inability to control one individual in the group or make one certain member the lead so that a certain class is in the front, how buggy it is (how Terribly buggy it is), and also a rather lackluster story. I feel a bit meaner with it considering there hasn't been any recent major news for expansions and such, and how many bugs have been on there for a long time and haven't been resolved.

If they make a sequel, I'd be excited for them to expand on this game and fix their mistakes. And I'm really really really hopeful for a sequel because I love the Alien series and I fuck with this game design.

Dark Descent is a real time strategy game where you control a squad of 4-5 marines completing a variety of objectives to escape from a planet now overrun by aliens, a cult, experimented on humans, and enemy soldiers while using a damaged troop carrier, the USS Otago, as a base where you can manage your Colonial Marines and research upgrades.

The prologue of the game has you controlling a Weyland Yutani administrator who escapes a station that has been overrun with aliens after she activates a quarantine procedure that destroy an escaping infestation and another ship while heavily damaging and grounding the Otago, a troop carrier whose personnel rescue her. Both her and the marines attempt to quarantine the outbreak while saving as many people on the planet as they can while trying to find a way to escape the planet and bypass the satellites that will shoot down anything that passes low orbit.

Mission have you choosing and equipping between 1-5 marines of five available classes and completing a variety of primary and secondary objectives on locations like derelict ships, space stations, research bases, alien hives, dockyards, corporate offices, destroyed living spaces, etc. While the missions are linear in their progression you can go back to areas you have been to before to gather supplies or find missing datapads, though it should never be necessary. At any point that you are able to reach the vehicle that deploys with your marines you can choose to extract your squad to refill ammo, supplies, and possibly switch out marines if yours have been wounded or traumatized. Stress can build up while under attack or hunted that can raise trauma levels and give each marine a variety of passive penalties until they spend time with a psychologist on the ship, on the normal difficulty this never happened for me. As in most games like this, depending on the amount of damage a marine suffers they will have to spend a certain number of days in the medbay before that can be deployed again. For ever doctor that you start with on staff or rescue during missions or during random end day events you can use one to lower the time needed to recover for a marine by one day, even using multiple on the same character. Certain wounds can also lead to penalties in a mission until healed or might lead to a body part needing a prosthetic, thought I never did have anyone lose a body part. Going on a mission will also cause a marine to become tired, to lose that status they have to sit out the next mission or they will have a penalty to their bravery (stress defense) and accuracy. Going on a mission while tired will cause them to become exhausted which will now force them to rest for two days.

While on a mission your marines constantly move as one group, though depending on where everyone is in their formation you might have only one who is in a position to be spotted by an enemy or who has a line of sight on a target. Once an enemy engages them they will all automatically attack targets but you can set priority targets be clicking on an enemy or engage a target that has not engaged you yet by clicking on them. You can pause or slow time down (depending on the option chosen in the gameplay settings) to bring up a list of commands that allow you to use special abilities or special weapons and gadgets you have equipped at the cost of command points. You get four command points that slowly recharge over time to do things like having a soldier use suppressing fire to slow enemy advance at the chosen angle, use a weapon like a shotgun, flamethrower, or sniper rifle, set a mine up, set up a motion tracker that can be activated to lure enemies in, throw a flare to increase accuracy in its AoE, etc. In addition to command actions you can also order marines use equipped gear like medkits, tools to seal a door or to hack or repair things in the environment, to set up or reload sentry guns, or to use ammo to reload their own guns or to set up explosives to blow up weakened walls. Certain rooms are marked as potential safe areas and completely sealing a room allows you to rest which will lower stress and may have other effects depending on the classes and skills of your marines.

The way that everyone moves as a squad both works very well while also creating problems. On one hand it makes things simple to control most of the time, I never once had anyone get caught or stuck in the environment or running some different path from everyone else, etc. On the other it can make using cover or hiding awkward when suddenly one person isn't quiet able to fit on a cover spot. Formations options to change how people are standing would have been nice as having no control frequently has the person equipped with the tool you need standing in a spot that isn't fitting for the situation. Your marine with the flamethrower and shotgun might be behind everyone, your recon class you typically would want in front is somewhere else, your most wounded character isn't standing near the center where it is safter and keeps moving to the frontline, etc. Interacting with objects will typically have the closest person run over to do it before they rejoin the squad when they are done, this is usually fine but you might have a more combat focused character suddenly trying to open a door, or it just assumes you want your tech guy to drive the power loader or medic to extract samples from an enemy body when they might be one of your most combat effective character or equipped or injured in a way where you don't want them doing that.

There are five classes a marine can become once they hit level three and lose their generic rookie class. The most useful classes that I always had one of was the Sergeant and Recon classes. A Sergeant increases your command points by one, lowers the recovery time of command points, and has an ability that prevents stress from increasing for 30 seconds at the cost of one command point. Having a sergeant meant I never had to worry about stress after the first few missions and always had better access to my most useful abilities. A Recon class makes the squad move a little faster and has a variety of what I found useless gadgets to track enemies on top of the motion sensor you already have, what they also have is the most useful thing in the game which was a silenced sniper rifle that they can use as soon as they become a recon class. Spending a command point to aim an instant and silent kill shot at lone enemies combined with the use of your motion tracking and ability to hide in cover really opens up stealth options that can see you having a much easier time getting through missions in one attempt as you avoid being hunted or increasing alien aggression as those hunts build up. They also allow you to exploit many of the encounters with groups of human enemies where you can just snipe them without engaging in the fairly poor gun battles you can get into. The Gunner could easily be the remaining 2-3 spots in your squad. The gunner has access to the smartgun that holds more ammo, fires faster, and can be set up as it's own sentry on top of the dedicated sentry guns you have while your gunner fights with their secondary weapon. They make the entire squad better at suppression fire for each one in the squad and get a passive bonuses to getting dismembering or critical hits on enemies. Like in most strategy games Medics have a variety of skills for helping you a bad situation that you probably could have avoided if you brought someone along who wasn't a medic. The best thing about them is that this is finally a game where just having one of them on your team can lower after time required to spend in the medbay by 30%, making them much better than XCOMs medics. The final class is the Tecker which the game makes almost useless for some reason. The Tecker has a drone that can learn to seal and unseal doors for you, which is never really useful as it isn't really a game where you want or need to be on the run sealing doors behind you, near the end of the game when they reach level 10 the drone can be equipped with a submachine gun on top of the possibility of it being targeted by enemies which can make them slightly more useful at the very end. The main thing the Tecker does is have the ability to spend a tool to hack and open certain doors that can lead to alternate routes or additional supplies, this would be great accept every other class in the game can do this if you spend a level up on the random perk Smart Ass that allows them to do this exact thing with no penalties to anything like time to hack or requiring more tools to do it.

Each marine isn't necessarily too different from one another though as they all share the same amount of armor, health, bravery, and base 50% accuracy. As they level up they are doing to get their three class skills you unlock and three passive class skills you get automatically but much of what they do comes from the random perks available to them at every level up. At each level a marine can have one of three random perks assigned to them that can range from the extremely useful Unbreakable Will to never become tired or exhausted, Sharpshooter 1-3 that raises accuracy by 5 each time, Smart Ass to make your Tecker obsolete, Team Spirit to increase command points by one for every two in squad that have it, Dead Eye to increases crit and dismember chances (best for Gunners), or you can get fairly useless things like Looter that gives a meaningless increase to supplies gained and Quick Hands to reload faster which tends to not come up in combat as long as you remember to do it manually when they get down to around 15%-25% ammo left. With the right traits and every class getting access to the powerful plasma gun at rank 10 that can do almost as much damage as smartgun your Medic and Tecker can be almost or more effective than your other characters depending on how things played out in the random perks given to you (though you can technically reroll them if you reload the last save before a mission ended and finish it again). This also means that apart from getting Sharpshooter and in some cases unlocking their class at level three and first class ability, characters don't tend to become that much more combat effective as the game naturally goes on except for higher levels giving most classes access to more powerful guns (though you likely still want one person with the base rifle for its grenade launcher ability that is both good against aliens and can be very effective against in cover human enemies).

You can recover certain xenotech in missions that can be researched for passive upgrades that can be activated at the cost of using alien samples you acquire at the start of each mission. Most of these aren't too useful but there are some ones I took each time once I had access to them such as armor nullifying the effects of acid as long as you don't have it all hit or shot off, increasing the amount needed to raise alien aggression levels, increased time needed for aliens to detect you, an extra point of armor for everyone, and an option to remove a facehugger from a marine. Your ship also allows you to spend supplies to unlock new main weapons like the smartgun, stronger pulse rifle without a grenade launcher, and plasma gun, secondary weapons you will never use unless you are a gunner like a revolver and SMG, and special weapons that include the sniper rifle, flamethrower, mine, and rocket launcher. With the addition of the base shotgun, once you unlock the ability to field a fifth squad member halfway through the game you can make use of every special weapon on each mission, with the more direct combat focused ones likely being better on your characters with lower accuracy or without a smartgun.

Each day that passes increases the infestation level of the planet that can lead to higher concentrations of enemies, near the end of the game the current infestation can be reduced by spending a supply type that you acquire from some dead enemies. A few missions into the game a timer will also begin showing how much time is left before the planet is destroyed, the game must be completed within that timeframe. On the normal difficult I still had slightly more than half of the allowed time, as long as you are finishing missions in 1-3 trips it shouldn't become an issue.

Completeing the game gives you a new game plus feature where you can start a campaign in another location with different difficulty settings while keeping your marines levels and skills while increasing the level cap to 15.

There was constant stuttering while moving the camera that would have made the game completely unplayable until I saw someone say to turn off Nvidia's Shadowplay's Instant Replay which fixed the issue. In the current version at least two of the achievements were bugged, the one for collecting all datapads and the one for getting 10 kills with one sentry gun in one set up.

Dark Descent is a fun and atmospheric game with more unique squad control and mission types for a game in this genre that also handles the source material well. Though it can be slow, a bit awkward to control at times, and doesn't offer as much soldier customization and build options as you might want for the genre.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1794971666109317596