Square Enix has, apparently, done it again. The Left Alive release date hit a few days ago, and it’s getting the kind of dismal reviews we haven’t seen out of a major publisher since – well, Square’s own Quiet Man, released just a few months ago. We don’t currently have a Left Alive review in planning – a fact I am immensely grateful for – but it seems right that we should highlight the efforts of others who have played the game so you don’t have to.
Eurogamer’s review says Left Alive is “leaden, cheap and in parts downright broken – and sadly, those parts are the most fundamental ones, such as its stealth.” Metro lays out the negatives like this: “The controls are atrocious, ruining both the combat and the stealth sections. Low-tech, unpredictable AI, horribly infrequent checkpoints, and multiple difficulty spikes.”
Left Alive hasn’t quite hit the dizzying lows The Quiet Man did on aggregators like OpenCritic and Metacritic, but that might just owe to the few reviews that have been published so far. PlayStation Lifestyle is an outlier in offering a “cautious” recommendation – specifically for fans of the “gritty and janky, but unique low-budget Japanese genre game.”
On the other hand, Push Square says “Left Alive categorically fails at everything it sets out to accomplish,” and that it’s a “truly miserable experience.”
Eurogamer – No recommendation
Metro GameCentral – 3/10
PCGamesN – we saved ourselves
PC Invasion – 2/10
Push Square – 2/10
PlayStation Lifestyle – 7/10
User reviews haven’t fared much better. The game’s sitting at a “very negative” rating on Steam, and user response to the Japanese version – released a week earlier – was just as dismal. As Polygon reports, Square Enix briefly disabled the game’s streaming features following the overwhelmingly negative response.
戦車倒しました #LEFTALIVE pic.twitter.com/W4qWWyGKuZ
— ACE (@automatter) March 3, 2019
It’s easy to see why.
Related: Find the will to live in the best survival games on PC
It’s tough for a bad game to stand out anymore given how many blandly terrible titles hit Steam every day. Props to Square Enix for bringing back the days of uniquely awful titles coming out of major publishers on a regular basis.