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It was 31 years ago, somehow, that Bart Simpson uttered his classic Christmas wish: Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell! A lot’s changed since then, including our capacity for interactive violence and ironic hyperbole, which leads me to my point: Rebellion unveiled its new game during today’s Xbox showcase, a first-person sci-fi horror romp called—brace yourself—Alien Deathstorm.
Alien Deathstorm is not related to the famed Alien franchise, although there are some similarities: An off-world colony has been ravaged by a deathstorm and overrun by aliens, and you—just you, nobody else—have been dispatched to figure out what’s going on and get it straightened out.
There’s also apparently some visual inspiration at work in the game, although names are never named. “We’ve been inspired by the slightly more analogue world of 1980s sci-fi, which is much more mechanical keyboard than it is touchscreen,” Rebellion design head Ben Fisher said on the Xbox Wire.
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“We think it’s given our colony a chunky, lived-in aesthetic that has a genuinely unique feel. We’ve taken influences from everything from Lovecraftian eldritch horror to 1980s VHS sci-fi, so we think that people will be intrigued by what we’ve built.”
Unlike that other Alien, though, players won’t be entirely overpowered and screwed by this game’s enemy creatures. As combat engineers, players take on the role of a “highly trained first responder who is proficient in search and rescue, combat, demolitions and engineering,” and Fisher made it clear that at some points in the game, it’ll be the player hunting the aliens.
The Deathstorm will also be a persistent threat, and not one you can fight back against. “It’s a planet-wide, seasonal atmospheric cataclysm that has torn through the colony without warning, causing absolute havoc,” Fisher said. “The player will have to learn how and when to seek shelter, if they want to survive these hurricane force winds that are tearing the world around them apart.”
In gameplay terms, Fisher said Alien Deathstorm is a “true hybrid” of survival game and shooter: “An ‘action horror’ game with a layer of constant threat and environmental discovery that fully supports the second-to-second ballistic action,” to my ears a very carefully-crafted statement that doesn’t say much.
At the same time, though, I really enjoyed Rebellion’s previous game, Atomfall, which can be described in basically the same terms. It does what it does very well, which is partly a result of Rebellion’s conscious effort to avoid trying to do too much, and the possibility that Alien Deathstorm might work the same magic has me eager to give it a go.
There’s no release target for Alien Deathstorm just yet, but a Steam listing is live—I won’t tell you to wishlist it or go to hell, but you know I’m thinking it.
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