I am Alive... but is it worth it
Posted 08-07-2012 at 1:20 PM by Pistachio
Tags i am alive, psn, survival games, xbla, xbox 360
In my last blog post I was deciding on my next XBLA game and chose I Am Alive. So, how did I get on? Well, the game was difficult, more so than I expected, and the pace a little on the slow side. Even so, it was definitely worth playing, but may not be a game that is suited to everyone's tastes.
So where did this game start? I Am Alive is a bit of a strange one. It seems that the game started being developed in 2008, but for one reason or another release dates kept slipping. There is a forum post on AVF suggesting the first mooted release date was 2009. This slipped to 2010, then passed and was pushed back to 2011. The game was eventually released in March 2012. During the intervening period the game also changed from being a full price release to an XBLA title. Let's hope all the delays and setbacks have not left us with a sub-standard product. The thread linked here charts the comments of some of the AVF'ers since July 2008!
The game is set a year after some sort of devastating ‘event’. There is no further information on the nature of the event, the player is left to speculate. There are no zombies or aliens in this game – in the world that is left after the event, there is a sliver of humanity struggling for survival in a dog-eat-dog world where anything goes. You are one man, alone, with the aim of surviving and finding your wife and child. The game opens showing a camcorder video diary that your character is keeping for your wife and child. The camera moves in behind you to reveal the extent of the damage caused by the event, a world riddled with earthquakes and an asphyxiating dust. Your journey starts with a quiet beginning engulfed by grainy dark surroundings, almost black and white. There is no soundtrack to the game, just an eerie quiet and sound effects depending on the challenge you are facing. This sets the mood of the game.
The game is not a fast paced third person shooter. It is something of a cross between an adventure, puzzle, and survival that makes you think hard about some of the choices you need to make as you progress through the game. As you progress you need to make decisions on how you approach this world of extremely limited resources (in the year since the event almost everything has been looted). Will you stop and help a stranger, sharing your valuable resources and risking being robbed and killed, or will you take from others more vulnerable than yourself in order to survive? Whilst the game does reward you with extra lives (retries) for helping strangers, there may be cases where you just do not have something that another person needs to survive. So, how do you tackle this world? Well you do start with a gun for anyone who tries to rob you… but you have no bullets (not even one – in fact throughout the game I don’t think I ever had more than three bullets at once). You also have a health bar, and a stamina bar. This latter feature makes the game decidedly more difficult. Limited stamina With the city being in ruins, there are a number of segments where you need to negotiate a path over buildings, broken bridges, and even cliffs caused by the earthquakes. This involves a lot of climbing, and this is where the stamina bar comes into play, which drains every time you run, jump, climb or breathe in noxious dust.
Your character is no superhero – the stamina bar goes down when you run, sprint and especially climb. As you climb up some girder and start shimmying across a platform, and your stamina bar starts to drain, your controller starts to vibrate and music starts to tell you to press on and that time is running out. If you run out of stamina – you fall. No Prince of Persia acrobatics here, just a simple climb mechanism and a stamina bar that runs dry too quickly. The game makes you feel fairly fragile, very human.
The climbing sequences can be quite difficult – choosing the right times to use pitons and even just plotting the right route. A couple of moves in the wrong direction, and you may not have enough stamina to make it. You do certainly breathe a sigh relief when you make it to your objective and begin recovering your stamina. I did come across a couple of frustrating climbs where the camera changed angle, making the character change direction, using up valuable stamina points correcting the mistake. Just a little annoying.
In terms of combat, the gameplay is unique – Ubisoft use what they are calling “intimation based combat”. The protagonist starts the game with a gun… but with no bullets. You can still point it at enemies, some armed with a knife may submit to the threat, but if you don’t knock them out quickly, they will call your bluff and charge you down. Some enemies have a knife, others guns and occasionally you will find some with homemade armour. How you approach these situations, especially when multiple enemies are concerned, can take a little bit of thinking, but often the game does not give you much time to formulate a strategy. This does make the combat interesting and makes you think about how to make use of the very limited moves that you have. One of the first combat experiences is against four thugs who approach you in two sets of two. The first one has a gun and the other three have machetes. You have a machete and an unloaded gun. What to do? These are some of the sorts of combat situations that you will need to work through.
Another aspect that makes the game difficult is the toxic dust that features in some parts of the game (at street level). The dust drains your stamina very quickly, and you keep needing to climb to higher ground to get fresh air. The dust also makes it difficult to see your surroundings, this leaves you unsure of what direction to take, where enemies are, and where you can climb to reach higher ground. In some ways this does add to the tension of this survival game, but on a practical level, it actually just discourages the user from exploring the world that the game developers have created – possibly a little counterproductive?
This game can feel quite slow and some of the levels feel unbalanced (some are long and very challenging, others are over very quickly). Overall though this game is challenging, especially on survivor difficulty. But with some of the difficulty and slow gameplay, I can understand people getting frustrated with the pace, possibly even finding it boring, and prefering to switch on an action packed shooter. Maybe this is one of those games where you have to be in the right mood to play it. Some parts do require a reasonable amount of thinking, and the sensory deprivation by the dust cloud coupled with your very fragile stamina means you need to invest some thought before moving forward; I think these add together to create a compelling game. For some, the game may require too much effort that may put them off playing or finishing it. Regardless of this, I think this game has a lot to offer those who are willing to invest the time – for those that do, the game offers plenty of moments where you will take a deep sigh of relief that you survived and make you feel that you achieved something.
So where did this game start? I Am Alive is a bit of a strange one. It seems that the game started being developed in 2008, but for one reason or another release dates kept slipping. There is a forum post on AVF suggesting the first mooted release date was 2009. This slipped to 2010, then passed and was pushed back to 2011. The game was eventually released in March 2012. During the intervening period the game also changed from being a full price release to an XBLA title. Let's hope all the delays and setbacks have not left us with a sub-standard product. The thread linked here charts the comments of some of the AVF'ers since July 2008!
The game is set a year after some sort of devastating ‘event’. There is no further information on the nature of the event, the player is left to speculate. There are no zombies or aliens in this game – in the world that is left after the event, there is a sliver of humanity struggling for survival in a dog-eat-dog world where anything goes. You are one man, alone, with the aim of surviving and finding your wife and child. The game opens showing a camcorder video diary that your character is keeping for your wife and child. The camera moves in behind you to reveal the extent of the damage caused by the event, a world riddled with earthquakes and an asphyxiating dust. Your journey starts with a quiet beginning engulfed by grainy dark surroundings, almost black and white. There is no soundtrack to the game, just an eerie quiet and sound effects depending on the challenge you are facing. This sets the mood of the game.
The game is not a fast paced third person shooter. It is something of a cross between an adventure, puzzle, and survival that makes you think hard about some of the choices you need to make as you progress through the game. As you progress you need to make decisions on how you approach this world of extremely limited resources (in the year since the event almost everything has been looted). Will you stop and help a stranger, sharing your valuable resources and risking being robbed and killed, or will you take from others more vulnerable than yourself in order to survive? Whilst the game does reward you with extra lives (retries) for helping strangers, there may be cases where you just do not have something that another person needs to survive. So, how do you tackle this world? Well you do start with a gun for anyone who tries to rob you… but you have no bullets (not even one – in fact throughout the game I don’t think I ever had more than three bullets at once). You also have a health bar, and a stamina bar. This latter feature makes the game decidedly more difficult. Limited stamina With the city being in ruins, there are a number of segments where you need to negotiate a path over buildings, broken bridges, and even cliffs caused by the earthquakes. This involves a lot of climbing, and this is where the stamina bar comes into play, which drains every time you run, jump, climb or breathe in noxious dust.
Your character is no superhero – the stamina bar goes down when you run, sprint and especially climb. As you climb up some girder and start shimmying across a platform, and your stamina bar starts to drain, your controller starts to vibrate and music starts to tell you to press on and that time is running out. If you run out of stamina – you fall. No Prince of Persia acrobatics here, just a simple climb mechanism and a stamina bar that runs dry too quickly. The game makes you feel fairly fragile, very human.
The climbing sequences can be quite difficult – choosing the right times to use pitons and even just plotting the right route. A couple of moves in the wrong direction, and you may not have enough stamina to make it. You do certainly breathe a sigh relief when you make it to your objective and begin recovering your stamina. I did come across a couple of frustrating climbs where the camera changed angle, making the character change direction, using up valuable stamina points correcting the mistake. Just a little annoying.
In terms of combat, the gameplay is unique – Ubisoft use what they are calling “intimation based combat”. The protagonist starts the game with a gun… but with no bullets. You can still point it at enemies, some armed with a knife may submit to the threat, but if you don’t knock them out quickly, they will call your bluff and charge you down. Some enemies have a knife, others guns and occasionally you will find some with homemade armour. How you approach these situations, especially when multiple enemies are concerned, can take a little bit of thinking, but often the game does not give you much time to formulate a strategy. This does make the combat interesting and makes you think about how to make use of the very limited moves that you have. One of the first combat experiences is against four thugs who approach you in two sets of two. The first one has a gun and the other three have machetes. You have a machete and an unloaded gun. What to do? These are some of the sorts of combat situations that you will need to work through.
Another aspect that makes the game difficult is the toxic dust that features in some parts of the game (at street level). The dust drains your stamina very quickly, and you keep needing to climb to higher ground to get fresh air. The dust also makes it difficult to see your surroundings, this leaves you unsure of what direction to take, where enemies are, and where you can climb to reach higher ground. In some ways this does add to the tension of this survival game, but on a practical level, it actually just discourages the user from exploring the world that the game developers have created – possibly a little counterproductive?
This game can feel quite slow and some of the levels feel unbalanced (some are long and very challenging, others are over very quickly). Overall though this game is challenging, especially on survivor difficulty. But with some of the difficulty and slow gameplay, I can understand people getting frustrated with the pace, possibly even finding it boring, and prefering to switch on an action packed shooter. Maybe this is one of those games where you have to be in the right mood to play it. Some parts do require a reasonable amount of thinking, and the sensory deprivation by the dust cloud coupled with your very fragile stamina means you need to invest some thought before moving forward; I think these add together to create a compelling game. For some, the game may require too much effort that may put them off playing or finishing it. Regardless of this, I think this game has a lot to offer those who are willing to invest the time – for those that do, the game offers plenty of moments where you will take a deep sigh of relief that you survived and make you feel that you achieved something.
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