I Am Alive

[nonamermcgee]

Just finally read up a blurb about this and figured out what it was about. Actually sounds like a neat idea, not something you see everyday in games. Post-disaster city where water is more important than money, and gang / martial law goes into effect*. I like the concept, how does one survive in that situation?

However, how does one make a game out of that? If I recall it's the Jade Raymond crew right? That doesn't instill a ton of confidence. Assassin's Creed sounded neat on paper, but the execution of putting gameplay into that concept was generic at best.

Knowing them, that won't be enough and they will need a "twist" too and there will be aliens or some time traveling shit worked in. It's like Oblivion with guns in the future but you really are time traveling to the past.

Anyhow, I like the setting and conceptual thought. Guess we'll see what the actual game turns out like.

* Felt I should clarify: In the modern everyday sense. Not in the dark gritty future where Bro's rule eternal by sheer force of their badassitude and gun size.

[Thrik]

Yeah, it's an interesting concept — I hope it turns into an interesting game.

Looks like Jade being involved was just a false rumour though, and it seems that Darkworks is developing it rather than Ubisoft Montreal (which is just handling the Windows port).

[Scratch]

This is not coming out this year right? I vaguely remember reading that it was pushed to early 2010.

[nonamermcgee]

Yeah, it's an interesting concept — I hope it turns into an interesting game.

Looks like Jade being involved was just a false rumour though, and it seems that Darkworks is developing it rather than Ubisoft Montreal (which is just handling the Windows port).

Interesting!

[MonkeyWrench]

Yeah according to an article in GamesTM the Darkwork guys said Raymond has no involvement in the game whatsoever. Another interesting snippet in the same article is that Darkworks have signed a partnership with Trioviz to utilise it's 3D technology, which uses a single display and a pair of glasses. A game like this might be a great poster child for true 3D gaming (that and Mirror's Edge 2!).

[MrChaz]

Easy, replace money with water and you've got a standard mercenaries game.

Replace bottle caps with water and you've got a fallout clone.

That works for a whole bunch of games. Never under estimate the ability of games to under-deliver on their premise.

[MonkeyWrench]

Looks like Ubisoft have taken dev duties off Darkworks, all very mutally decided mind:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ubisoft-pulls-i-am-alive-from-darkworks

[toblix]

omg leaked trailer:

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Could be very interesting indeed if they make it so weapons are for getting out of tricky situations rather than shooting bandids in the dick.

Graphics looks sort of dated, but its leakedness could mean it's an old build.

It's Ubisoft:fart:, so they're bound to fuck it up somehow.

[Murdoc]

A little more post apocalyptic than the original concept, which is a bit disappointing, but, hey, its still getting made so here's hoping its good... also hope it doesn't turn into a hobo murder simulator like that one xbox game.

[elmuerte]

Looks a bit like Mirror's Edge with Guns and Grit.

[Gwardinen]

Looks a bit like Mirror's Edge with Guns and Grit.

It looks more like Uncharted to me. Almost ridiculously so. It's like Uncharted and Fallout 3 had a baby... not necessarily a bad idea.

[elmuerte]

Ah yes, Uncharted without color

[Erkki]

A dev diary video:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/developer-diary-i-am-alive/727329

[Thrik]

Now a download-only title.

[Korax]

Now a download-only title.

Didn't it go that way a year ago?

[Thrik]

Dunno, my knowledge of the game is largely based on this thread.

[toblix]

Okay, so it's out. Anyone play it? Is it any good? The Giant Bomb quick look made it seem a little boring... the environments seemed uninteresting, and the confrontations too frequent and hard to figure out. I like that there appeared to be a puzzle element to them, figuring out the situation and the right move whilst under pressure, but in the quick look, at least, it also looked like they were all based on just killing the first dude that approaches you and scrambling for a gun.

[thainatos]

I've been playing it, and it is very much like Uncharted meets Silent Hill. The story's not too engrossing, but the mechanics are great. Every gunfight is basically a puzzle to be solved. Climbing is solid and well paced. The stamina bar adds a layer of drama that makes you feel like you have to scrounge for every little thing. It's just very well balanced and an interesting world to explore. And it's only $15.

[toblix]

After playing it for an hour, I was pretty pissed at this game. After playing it for another hour, I'm sort of loving it. It's definitely worth the whatever amount it costs. At first I had a problem with the encounters, in which you encounter people who usually need to defeated in some form of combat (shooting them, cutting them or kicking them into holes.) A short description of the mechanics of an encounter follows: You approach/are approached by one or more men who shout things at you and tend to approach you with guns or machetes drawn. Your goal is to kill, knock out or kick into a hole these men, and your tools are your gun (which has, on a very good day, maybe two bullets in it) and your machete.

Now, at first I think I over-complicated things, for some reason having the impression there were statistics varying from guy to guy, and you didn't know how they would react to whatever went down. This, combined with the more-than-average punishing system of giving you a limited number of retries before sending you back to a checkpoint, made me frustrated. After all, how can they make a failure/retry-based game that punishes you unfairly for trying and failing?

After some more encounters I think I've found things are much simpler, and there's more of a predictable logic to how NPCs act and react. Basically, you want to control the guns right away, and then start murdering people until they surrender. If someone has a gun, they need to die right away – then you move in and grab their gun before someone else does. This creates a fantastic tension in each encounter. First, determining who has a gun. Then, like a real badass, as your first victim approaches, planning the order in which these fools are going to die; and finally, as soon as the first guy is down, the tension of controlling the situation by quickly aiming back and forth between everyone, trying to keep them at bay as you move in to grab any weapons on the ground.

There was this moment after I had come down from the construction site and grabbed the antibiotics. I was on the elevated railway, making my way back to the wall, when I heard a woman shouting for help. I looked and looked, but in all the dust it was impossible to see anything. I climbed down to ground level, but down there the dust is so thick it starts eating at your stamina, which means you can only move so far out before you have to return and climb back up. I did this a couple of times, each time heading out in a different direction, trying to triangulate her position based on sound, but I couldn't find her. In the end I had to go on my way, and left her voice behind me. Not a very original thing in a game, maybe – a voice shouting for help – but the fact that there is no quick-save, and being allowed a limited number of failures before being thrown even further back in the game, made my decision that much harder.

The climbing is a bit wonky, I think, but nothing game-breaking. I like that there are climbing paths that lead nowhere, forcing you to plan ahead. That makes it doubly exciting when the gutter suddenly breaks and you have to simultaneously make sure you find something new to grab on to, and come up with a whole new strategy for finding somewhere to rest before your stamina runs out.

A better version of this post is: At first I thought this game sucked, but now I quite like it. It uses checkpoints and limited retries to create tension and suspense that lends weight to the various encounters and situations you end up in.

[Erkki]

Makes me want to get my Xbox fixed. Is it coming to any other platforms?

[Tanukitsune]

It just came out on PSN and has a discount for PSN+ users, although I'm still debating whether to get it.

Does the game sort of penalize you for killing the innocent? I saw some footage of a person killing people who threatened them, only to find their child a few moments later.

Is it really that hard to tell who is innocent but scared and feels threatened and who is just a person who will shoot you for your items? Can you actually not kill them if you don't want to anyway?

[toblix]

Played some more (

just done with the ship

), and I've started running into more and more encounters in which I'm cast into the thick of it and have to be really quick about dropping fools right away before they get too close. Then there are the

armored

guys, which... I don't know, I guess they were inevitable, but they make me feel the game is going in a weird shooty direction. I really hope it's just that particular location, and that they manage to maintain the desolate feeling of the game throughout the rest of it. I gotta have passed the half-way marked already. I don't really see much use for the bow; whenever I draw it I get attacked (they're not 'fraid of no bow), and it's not like there's a stealth element to the game, so it's like omg where do you guys want me to use the BOWWWWW.

[thainatos]

I use the bow to take out the armored guys. You've gotta drop them first anyway, so might as well do it with a weapon that doesn't scare the others.

[toblix]

Finished it, and I'm pretty happy I did, if only to see where they went with it all (and get the achievement for completing the game...) Turns out they increased the amount of forced combat towards the end, making the whole tactical thing increasingly useless. Also, I got a sweet shotgun I never once fired.

[Tanukitsune]

I've started to play it now and it's totally breaking the immersion with "you shouldn't go there yet".

It's strange to play a game with limited continues, I guess everything is scarce in this game.