I’m really loving Aliens: Dark Descent. It turns out gear you set up is persistent between missions, so I can spend an hour setting up minefields and listening posts on my first run at a location then come back for another mission later and be like Navy SEALs sneaking past all the enemies and luring them into prepared killing fields taking no losses.

Find a sentry gun in a mission? You can pick it up and take it with you, back to your base even. Or forget it there, come back on another mission, remember it and pick it up! Even corpses are persistent between missions, so if you forget alien samples you wanna take you can get those too on latter missions. (So far I have had to visit each location twice but in theory I’m allowed to go back more)

I also have to deal with treating marines wounds, their exhaustion levels, and their combat fatigue (PTSD) all as individual unique problems. You can’t just level up one squad of marines and use them for every mission because they have to sleep and have their melted faces surgically re-attached and cry into their pillow about it with a therapist because killing aliens is scary and people die. (You accumulate stress based on being in combat, seeing aliens, watching your friends die, being actively hunted by xenos who don’t know where you are but are trying to find you …)

It’s so satisfying to walk past all the aliens on the level thanks to the listening devices you planted last mission, plant war crime levels of mines outside the hive, set up sentry guns, and lure the queen and her army of bodyguards to sprint full force into said minefields and machinegun nests and proceed to regret every decision they’ve ever made up to that point.

There are plenty of issues like sometimes being forced into stupid situations where you’re not allowed to control your squad and you take damage no matter what, but they’re generally not too bad and this game is fucking lit. You play as a Weyu executive who’s having … Well, let’s say a very bad day, and has to manage some marines to make sure they get out of the shit alive!