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Alien: Isolation trailer reveals survivor mode. Challenge your friends to play with your predator

alien isolation oculus rift creative assembly

Alien: Isolation is already a challenge, you’re being hunted by an AI alien that is stronger, faster, and, certainly in my case, smarter than you. Your weapons can’t kill it and your items can only ever distract it for a short while. So, naturally, Creative Assembly made a mode where it’s significantly more difficult.

Survivor mode pits you against the alien, limits your resources, and gives you a time limit. On the plus side you now get a lovely score at the end which you can compare with your friends.

Here’s the Alien: Isolation survivor mode trailer:

It’s a little like a vertical slice of the game proper, you’re given a section of the space station Sevastopol and a set of objectives to complete to escape.

It’s not just about completing the map as quickly as possible, your final score is also determined by how you played. You can get bonuses for not using weapons, not collecting items, not being detected, and so on.

You’re not just thrown against the alien, either. Survivor missions take different enemies from the game, synths and mercs, for instance, and builds a level around them. Trying to hide from the alien is a very different challenge to avoiding patrol sweeps from a group of human enemies.

Creative Assembly first showed off Survivor Mode at E3 this year but they wouldn’t say at the time whether it would ship with the final game or if they’d made simply to make it easy to demo on the show floor.

In a sense it isn’t: Isolation will only ship with a single Survivor Mode mission, ‘Basement’. The others will come in DLC packs. When the game hits its 7 October release date a pack of missions will be available as DLC.

There are plans for five separate Survivor Mode DLCs, the first comes with three new maps and a new playable character. The other four will feature new maps and another character, too.

I’ve played a lot of Alien: Isolation’s campaign and that’s a challenge enough for me, I’m not sure I could take the pressure of a ticking clock on top of the prowling alien itself. However, if you’re more capable of withstanding the challenge then this could be an ideal way to extend the campaign. Especially as I think that, while the alien’s behaviour will change a lot with a replay, the campaign may not lend itself to repeated playthroughs. The areas will become too familiar and much of the creeping horror will be lost.