Dean Cain
Will Murdock
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Aug 6, 2002 · Edit page. Descent Into Darkness: Directed by Daniel Knauf. With Dean Cain, Scott Wiper, Biliana Petrinska, Maxim Genchev. Deep in the Mariana Sea Basin, several miners have died under mysterious circumstances. Officer Will Murdock of the Deep Submersible Division is brought down to investigate.
- (463)
- Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
- Daniel Knauf
- 2002-08-06
Watch Dark Descent with a subscription on Prime Video. A man (Dean Cain) uncovers a conspiracy while investigating the mysterious deaths of several underwater miners.
- Wilfred Schmidt
- Adventure, Mystery & Thriller
- Dean Cain
- A tense survival horror RTS with a few too many technical bugs.
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By Leana Hafer
Updated: Jun 20, 2023 3:21 pm
Posted: Jun 19, 2023 6:00 pm
Even with all the wild genre mashups I've seen over the last several years, I don't think I could have ever predicted a survival horror RTS. And that's basically what Aliens: Dark Descent boils down to, adding stealth elements and tense resource management to its isometric, squad-based tactical action. When it's fully locked and loaded, it captures the essence of the 1986 film Aliens better than any game in ages. But slimy, fun-bursting technical issues show their creepy heads too often for Dark Descent to be a smooth ride.
It is entirely possible to go in guns blazing and probably rack up a bunch of easy kills. But every time a xenomorph spots you, it alerts the hive and starts a clock ticking that will cause them to become more numerous and aggressive, which makes the whole rest of the mission harder. The optimal way to play is usually not to get spotted at all. But...
Even a firefight with no lacerations or acid burns takes its toll. Simply encountering aliens, being hunted during a hive activation phase, or even seeing a lot of blips on the motion tracker, all cause stress. This can stack up to three randomized debuffs on your marines, as they go all, "Game over, man! Game over!" and set everyone else even more on edge, miss crucial shots, or become disobedient. So the more horror you've put them through, the less effective they're going to be in a fight.
The way this combines with the hive awareness system to create a natural progression from those first few, teasing engagements with a single drone, to feeling like all hell has broken loose and one wrong move could mean a total squad wipe, is nothing short of brilliant. It humanizes all your little soldiers while making you think really carefully about how to manage your physical and psychological resources. Sometimes it's better to signal the dropship and leave a mission with objectives still incomplete, costing precious time on the campaign map since you'll have to come back later, but saving the lives of your fighters. And it means every mission feels like a good Alien movie, complete with a slow build-up to a shrieking, gunfire-punctuated crescendo.
Aliens Versus Predator 2 (2001)
Aliens vs. Predator (2010)
Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013)
Alien: Isolation (2014)
Aliens: Fireteam Elite (2021)
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Here are all games set in the Alien universe, including games based on Ridley Scott's Alien, James Cameron's Aliens, and the rest. Log in to tag which games you own, have played, finished, or want to play.
And these environments look pretty incredible, too, capturing not just the style, but the atmosphere of James Cameron's unmistakable classic. The way the fog lights up when you shine a flashlight at it is a spine-tingling recreation of the way the film played with light and shadow. The sound design adds to this, with the unsettling squish-squish of marching through the alien-infested areas of the planet Lethe. And all along the way, a variety of mission and objective types keeps every deployment from feeling too samey. There are even some twists later on that introduce new and unexpected enemy types.
If not for the technical issues, this would be easily one of the best Aliens games ever. And it still probably is. Borrowing from some of the greatest squad-based tactics games and adding its own twists, I don't think I've played anything that really gets what was so cool about Aliens, the film, since Monolith's Aliens Versus Predator 2 way back in...
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Here's the plot: "Deep in the Mariana Sea Trench a corporate underwater mining complex has been built an industrial Atlantis When an accident in a drydock chamber kills several miners an...
Aug 6, 2002 · Dark Descent. R 2002 Action, Adventure, Thriller · 1h 36m. Stream Dark Descent. $8.99 / month. Watch Now. Deep in the Mariana Sea Trench, a corporate underwater mining complex has been built - an industrial Atlantis.
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Deep in the Mariana Sea Trench, a corporate underwater mining complex has been built - an industrial Atlantis. When an accident in a dry-dock chamber kills several miners an investigator is sent to find the cause and immediately finds out that it was not an accident. He becomes caught in the middle of a deadly conflict between the miners and the corporation, and fights to stay alive and ...
Aug 6, 2002 · Deep in the Mariana Sea Trench, a corporate underwater mining complex has been built - an industrial Atlantis. When an accident in a dry-dock chamber kills several miners an investigator is sent to find the cause and immediately finds out that it was not an accident.
