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I recently completed I Am Alive. That's right, the game whose developers like bitching about piracy on the PC, so I'm expecting some posts on that - do not disappoint, TTLG!!
The game is about a guy returning to his hometown to find his wife and daughter, one year after a massive apocalyptic event, which has destroyed most of the town and blanketed large areas in a thick dust cloud. Unlike other post-apocalyptic games, though, there's no mutants or zombies or somesuch to be seen (well, there's one guy who's hinted at to be a mutant). In that sense, it's much more The Road than Dawn of the Dead. The graphics are also very much in the Road vein, with lots of bleached whites and dusty greys. As a result, the game can look a bit samey, but I kinda liked it - gave the game a bit of a stark beauty.
Gameplay consists mostly of climbing buildings à la PoP: Sands of Time trilogy, with the exception that the main guy in I Am Alive is nowhere near as nimble as the prince in PoP, so no wall-running or anything like that. It's kept much more 'realistic' than that, i.e. with moves that a normal person (admittedly with experience in rock climbing) can do.
In fact, one other thing to distinguish it from PoP is the presence of a stamina meter. Everything strenuous you do (which includes climbing, walking around at ground level in the thick dust cloud, and melee combat) takes a toll on your stamina meter. This means you can't just hang around the outside of a building forever, but you have to find a safe ledge to rest on (which quickly refills your stamina meter).
The big negative about the game is the combat; as is the case in most survival (horror) games the combat is quite lethal, but that isn't the problem per se. It's more the fact that, among other things, virtually every combat move is tied to one button (the x button on the Xbox). For example, you can threaten enemies - all human, as mentioned previously - with an (empty) gun and order them to step back. Once they're backed up against a precipice or a fire you're meant to be able to kick them in and so get rid of them. However, half the time it initiates a 'struggle kill' instead, which means you locking machetes with the enemy. If there's another enemy present he will circle around you and attack you at this point. The timing between when pressing x results in a kick or a struggle kill isn't made particularly clear, so that can result in many frustrated restarts.
Nevertheless, I thought the rest of the game (the atmosphere, the stamina-based climbing gameplay, the story, etc.) all made up for the dreadful combat.
tl;dr - If you can get over the disappointing combat the game does present an interesting twist on the usual post-apocalyptic games, and is well worth it.
Originally Posted by Thirith
