Publisher: Ubisoft Shanghai
Cert: 18+
Platform: PS3 (PSN) Xbox 360 (XBLA)
Genre: Survival
I've been waiting for I Am Alive for a long time. Through initial press releases, company closures and developer changes it's been a hard road and many times I feared that a game that on paper was so good would never see the light of day. But finally thanks to Ubisoft Shanghai I Am Alive is being released of XBLA and PSN.
The backstory is paper thin and makes no excuses for it. It's sometime in the near future and "the Event" has wiped out civilization and left cities smouldering ruins full of toxic dust clouds. You have trekked across the US looking for your wife and daughter. Returning to your home city of Haventon you now have to somehow survive the dust, the earthquakes and the surviving inhabitants, all the while tracking down your family.
Before you even start playing you know I Am Alive isn't going to pull any punches, everything is grim, dark and malevolent. The game does not reward playing, it punishes weakness. Didn't spot the jump? You're dead. Misjudged whether or not you should draw your gun and fire? You're dead. Hung around on a ladder a few seconds too long? You're so dead. At one point I turned a corner into someone I hadn't seen and they panicked and killed me instantly, at another I was calmly backing away from someone with a gun and they just shot me anyway.
You're not exactly drowning in ammunition either. I was a good 30 minutes into the game until I acquired my first bullet and it was a treasured item that made actually firing it a hard decision. Those kind of hard split second decisions are timed to perfection to generate more fear. Nothing is adequately explained, you're not told plainly what "the Event" actually was or what happened in the intervening year. There's no good reason for society to have collapsed the way it has and in the end the people out to murder you and just like you, survivors who are just trying to make it through the day. You basically have no-one to rely on, and the horror stems from the feeling of being completely alone in a place you used to call home.
Even when constantly faced with death, it never feel cheap. Within a game so grim and harsh the idea of “you get hit, you die” makes perfect sense. Death is generally recoverable by the use of a restart but run out of restarts and you're going back to the last checkpoint. It's a nice enough system meaning death is quick to happen but you don't lose so much that you're not just going to quit out of frustration.
A lot of the gameplay is platforming like Uncharted and it works perfectly. The opening stage has you climb across wrecked girders and leaping over gaps as you cross the bridge into what was your home. Again the game is out to kill you at every opportunity. Every action except walking uses up stamina. Stamina regenerates when you're resting or walking normally but once it crosses from the safe white bar into the dangerous red you have to hammer the right trigger just to stay alive and the stamina you use here detracts from your total. Run out of stamina and guess what? That's right, you die. The voice acting itself isn't top notch but it's used to perfection. The gruff shouting of a thug with a machete isn't the least bit frightening but the panicked whimpering for help leaves you almost not wanting to go help that person just to get away from the sound.
It is genuinely entertaining though, there's options to explore and the tension and fear of what might be around the next corner is very real, and made all the worse by the knowledge that you're not hiding from hordes of Zombies or demonic terrors, they're just regular people who could've been anything 18 months ago.
The visuals of the in-game city of Haventon are more a hit than a miss. Occasionally they're stunning, bleak sunshine barely getting through wrecked buildings, empty streets and poisonous dust. The atmosphere is oppressive and stifling. Haventon is now a ghost city and even with wide empty streets the feeling is claustrophobic. After any length of time the urge to explore is tempered by the knowledge that around that corner there could be 2 guys, and one of them might have a gun that actually works but the rewards are there. The character models can be a bit weak sometimes though, even falling down to Wii levels. You can excuse a few slips up from an XBLA title though.
This game hates me and I love it. It's pure survival horror in a genre full of games that miss the mark. It doesn't need to resort to jump scares or gribbly monsters because it understands how to be actually scary. It punishes your every mistake without making you want to quit. It's just in and of itself terrifying. Buy it as soon as you can.
Rent or Buy: Download
Gameplay: 5/5
Replay: 5/5
Graphics: 5/5
Overall: 5/5
Reviewed by: Tony O'Hare
