Alien: Blackout Review – Better than Five Nights at Freddy’s?

Alien: Blackout is a brand new survival horror game that takes place in the enormous movie franchise.

You play as Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, who’s trapped onboard the Weyland-Yutani space station alongside four fellow crew members.

We bet you can guess where this is going: that’s right, a Xenomorph is lose on the station and it’s in the mood to kill.

Armed only with a tablet-like device, you have to help Amanda and the crew escape the station before the Xenomorph brutally murders you all.

This is basically Five Nights at Freddy’s featuring the Xenomorph

In practice, it plays an awful lot like Five Nights at Freddy’s. With your tablet, you can monitor the different cameras in each level, use motion sensors to track the Xenomorph’s movements, and close / open doors as necessary.

You have a limited power supply though, so you can only provide power to up to five different systems at once.

That’s where the strategy comes in, as you use the tools at your disposal to keep on top of where the Xenomorph is at all times.

When you do find the monster, you can provide orders to your crew members to help keep them safe. You can order them to hide, move quietly, or run depending on the situation.

But it does make a few notable improvements

And there are times when they’ll have to move quickly. The Blackout part of the title refers to the eight-is minutes that you have to complete each level before you run out of power, and the station is drenched in darkness.

This is where we feel like Alien: Blackout improves on the Freddy’s formula. Having to keep an eye on crew members as they make their way around the ship made the experience feel a lot more like a strategy game, and when one inevitably dies you really feel like the Xenomorph is just one step closer to getting you.

And it can get to you. If you hear a scrambling in the vents, you have to quickly close the door to where you are before the Xenomorph gets you. You have to be sure it’s coming though, as closing the door routes all of the power away from your crew members.

Overall, we had a much better time with Alien: Blackout than we ever did with Five Nights at Freddy’s. You generally feel more in control of what’s going on, as the mechanics are very straightforward and looking after crew members provides an extra layer of strategy.

There is a cost to more straightforward mechanics

But this does come at a bit of a cost. When you figure out how the game works, it starts to lose its scares a bit because you’ll just go through the motions to keep yourself and your crew safe.

Before you get there though, you’ll have a ton of admittedly tense fun. It’s a very worthy successor to the Freddy’s franchise and we’d like to see a more fleshed out sequel at some point in the future.