Alien: Isolation 2 Might Be Losing the Original Game’s Best Feature 

The blaring sirens of a space station’s decontamination room are set to hit gaming consoles once again with the sequel to Creative Assembly’s survival horror game Alien: Isolation. 

In the teaser for the sequel, a 25-second clip titled A False Sense of Security, we are introduced to the familiar intense atmosphere of a deserted ship, only for the door to open to a desolate planet, then the image of a payphone reading “Emergency,” introducing the idea of a storyline taking place on the surface of a planet, a drastically different scenario than the first game. 

Released in 2014, Alien: Isolation remains one of the best-ever games in its genre. The player controls Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise, who is searching for the cause of her mother’s disappearance 25 years ago. Alien: Isolation encapsulates the feeling of the player as prey. You are in a spaceship, stuck in space with a hundred ways to die, and stalked by a predator of unknown potential. 

What truly made the game a phenomenon, however, was the xenomorph AI system, which was revolutionary to the 2010s gaming industry and made the Alien franchise’s iconic monster feel alive. The slimy beast operated as a living, unpredictable creature and gave gamers a real sense of survival and dread, when every decision they made was actually being responded to. This set the bar for AI in gaming exceptionally high. 

The sequel comes with more than a change in scenery and it’s a change that might jeopardize that xenomorphic experience. Creative Assembly is switching up its software with Unreal Engine 5 being used to build the game instead of the original’s Cathode Engine. This is a cause for concern, as Unreal Engine 5 has had a series of performance issues to the point where many gamers have asked companies to stop using it. 

Remnant 2 was a highly-anticipated game and one of the first built using Unreal Engine 5. Once released, players complained of performance issues, including frame drops, stuttering, and low FPS. Players also reported playing other high-definition games with different engines that ran more smoothly. 

Borderlands 4 ran exceptionally poorly, with tech experts saying it ran “worse than usual for an Unreal Engine 5 game.” In addition to performance woes, there were also visual issues. Players reported that elements like vegetation would change animation as one got closer, showing a distinct quality difference between visuals at different distances.

In a thread on the gaming community platform Steam, titled “Unreal Engine 5 sucks,” one commenter brings up the quality issues, with numerous replies expressing dissatisfaction with the performance of the engine. 

“It’s a laggy, unfinished, and unready mess,” the author of the thread commented. “ It barely looks any better than Unreal Engine 4 and literally runs 10x worse. 

Building Alien: Isolation 2 on a new engine means changing the custom-built systems that were included in the original game. On top of a possibly more expansive setting, the prospect of Creative Assembly dumbing down the AI system to make it a smoother-running game means the original mechanic that captivated players might not make it to the sequel

Cathode Engine gave Alien: Isolation a distinct character design and ambience specific to the feel of Alien. Unreal Engine has a similarly distinctive feel that transfers to all of the games designed under it, which takes away from the individualism that brought notoriety to the game in the first place. 

The release date and official title of the second installment of Alien: Isolation have yet to be announced.