Aliens: Dark Descent - more stand-up fight than bug hunt

The absolute worst thing in Aliens: Dark Descent isn't an alien, but the timeline in the top-right of the screen - or as I like to call it, Satan's Fast Forward Button. In this scrappy but compelling top-down tactics adaptation from Battlefleet Gothic: Armada developer Tindalos Interactive, you lead up to four Colonial Marines around labyrinths of corridors, flaming wreckage and sealed rooms, completing missions of the "activate the generator" variety while fending off - or preferably, avoiding - xenomorphs of all sizes and degrees of canonicity.

Armed with battle rifles, Smart Guns, flame-throwers, grenade launchers and, of course, shotguns for close encounters, your squad can shut down a single vanilla Alien without too much trouble, providing you master certain basic gambits like back-pedalling while shooting xenos to avoid their acid blood. But alerting one Alien alerts the entire hive, triggering a Hunt phase during which other Aliens home in on your position, while also kicking the aforesaid timeline into motion.

As the timeline advances, it increases the number and aggressiveness of the Aliens roaming each environment. The dots on your motion tracker move faster, switch direction more frequently, and make more spiteful use of the terrain, diving into tunnels to respawn behind you or lurking in vents next to rooms that harbour objectives. The timeline also gradually introduces beefier grades of extra-terrestrial, like the ground-pounding Crusher and the oddly team-spirited Praetorian, which hurries around rallying the other monsters like a D&D hero trying to Gather Their Party.

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