I'm a dev here on Steam, so I know the grinds of development very well. I'm never normally the type to leave negative reviews for that same reason. But this? Boggles my mind how this got released.

I played this for 13 minutes, and saw numerous issues that would have had me sending this back until they were fixed: Glitchy/sluggish menus, ugly textures, clunky controls, enemies take too many shots to kill, animations are wonky, and enemies glitch through walls making them almost invulnerable. If I noticed this in 13 minutes, i'm certain the devs of this noticed these issues as well.

Shameful.

Aaaaaaaand just like that they killed the last hope for the Alone in the Dark Franchise.

Now I've never written an actual review before but this is the game that made me have to do it. That's how bad it is. I recieved this a couple months ago, when they sent out closed BETA invites and was excited to see a new Alone in the Dark coming. I wasn't even aware that a new one was being produced so I became excited. So I redeemed the key and downloaded it and then opened it thinking I'd relive the horror and terror that the other Alone in the Darks caused me to have.

What I got was a co-op Wave Based game. Nothing scary about this particular game. They basically Resident Evil 6'd this game. It is definitely not a survival horror game. It is an action objective based wave game. You go around fully armed to the teeth and killing the creatures of the darkness. There's no sense of fear when you have an assault rifle with a flamethrower attached to it while dual wielding revolvers.

Now I'm not just going to bash this game because there are some cool things to this game, believe it or not. Here they are.


1. The lighting is kinda cool.


So that concludes my review of this game so do your best avoid spending any money on this particular game.

Dicated but not Read,

codybear93

Alone in the Dark... for survival horror fans, the franchise needs no introduction; it's indeed the grandfather of the genre, predating the rise of Resident Evil by four years. The earlier games, namely the initial trilogy, are completely bare bones by today's standards, but they're still considered some of the best survival horror experiences to date. Alone in the Dark: Illumination is the sixth release in the series, and it brings with it a new approach in terms of gameplay.

Moving away from the general structure of a survival horror game, Alone in the Dark: Illumination instead focuses on co-op and multiplayer gameplay in the same vein as Left 4 Dead and any other wave-based survival shooter. You have your choice of four characters, the witch, the priest, the engineer, and the hunter; each possess their own skill sets and special items that can be used. There's also a leveling system, and for each level some skill points are earned to further develop the multiple skill trees of each class. Even the four levels are set up in a Left 4 Dead style fashion, with each being split into four sections for an easier time with co-op in case your friend has to bolt; which they will, after playing this heaping mound of maggot infested donkey bile.

For a wave-based survival shooter, this title sure is lacking enemies. During the first level you will encounter a handful of Spiderman-in-the-Venom-suit looking foes, and by the time you reach the end, if you've dispatched every single bad guy, you'll have 21 kills. This persists through every single part of every single level, though only getting worse as time goes by. There are no random spawns, only pre-designated allotments of enemies after certain events unfold, such as blasting a path to the next area or opening the door to the end of the level. This leaves all of the environments entirely empty, and without anything to do save for the base objectives of getting from point A to point B by finding batteries, explosives, electrical wire, etc.

There's little to no music, very little ambience, and many of the sound effects are missing. For example, when blowing away a huge boulder using dynamite there was absolutely no explosion sound effect. There are also no footstep sounds, save for when you jump, and if you find yourself waist-deep in water, there's no splashing or water movement effects. This title also has horrid optimization, with framerates constantly fluctuating from 160 FPS down to 70 FPS with all settings on max while running on an i7 6700k/GTX 1080 system. Now that's not unplayable by any means, but for lower-end rigs it is going to present a much larger problem.

It's as if the developer accidentally released the alpha, not even the beta, version of Alone in the Dark: Illumination. The biggest, and most unforgivable factor here being the absurd lack of enemies and the terrible AI of the ones that do show up. I was able to stand right in front of many foes, to which they just teeter and stare back at me, doing nothing. Some will follow you, some may even try to attack you eventually, but if you attempt to lure them into the light they'll stand just outside of its radius and stare some more. Mind you, I was also playing on the highest difficulty available, which is a laughable skip through the park. I've played a lot of really awful games in my day, but this one takes the cake, and I'm truly sorry for any unfortunate individual that pre-ordered or paid full price for this absolute scam.

The Horror Network Curator | Group Click for Gore

It's like a Left for Dead without fun, good combat and shooting, art design, ballance and players. Don't buy it. It's a new game what is already dead. No lobby, no players. Single Player is horrible.

This has to be, hands down, the biggest piece of doodie I've played this year. I can't belive this was ever released. Good thing for Steam refunds, It's obvious that this was a very crappy game that Atari sank way too much money in and put the Alone in the Dark brand on it just so it would sell a few copies. Tank controls, crap visuals, bad models, horrible physics, and the sound distorts to the point that the game is completely inaudible. It has controller support in game but not in the game menu? Save your dollars on this one. Feels like a really bad early access. Maybe it'll be playable in a few updates because it isn't right now.

I heard how bad this game supposedly was. Watched very negative reviews on youtube. But something made me want to try it anyway. Got it for $5 on a steam sale and I'm happy I did.

This is not a bad game. Not a good game, But certainly not bad, I've played several games that were far worse this year alone. At launch it may have been bad, but it seems after some patches in the years following its release, they fixed a lot of the criticisms.

The atmosphere is pretty nice, Some spooky locations on dark stormy nights, abandoned mines or in a graveyard for example. There is a voiced narrator that adds a lot to each of the 4 characters journey. The character models were good and the levels were overall nice looking. A Few glitches. And while not a good game, it kept me wanting to play it. Each character is unique and plays differently and has their own story. I can see this game being fun as a multiplayer experience with friends but works as solo player.

The only real negatives I can say were

- Theres one part early on in the mines that you have to put some batteries in an elevator that is a bit buggy that caused some frustration.
-The game is not perfectly balanced by character or solo/mp experience. I played through the whole thing solo as the witch, sara hartwood, and enjoyed it. But getting to the final boss, it became clear that it was impossible to beat with this character alone even on easy. It's timed and her damage output is nowhere near what it needs to be to pull it off, even specked with all damage being highest possible. I had to play the last level as carnby and just shredded the final boss with ease.
-a character specific cutscene would have been really nice at the end of each of the 3 levels and would have went a long way to the story quality. The narrator just tells you what happened instead of a visual, and while he was great, just a few 15-20 second cutscenes would have really improved the quality.

Overall, its kind of a budget game, dont expect it to be an amazing experience, but if you go into it with an open mind, and didnt pay that much for it. Or if your a big alone in the dark fan, its worth trying, especially if you have a few friends that are interested.

This game. Just, this game. I have written few, if any reviews, but this one seems worth a special mention. It's laughable how bad this game is. Literally nothing about the game is even decent. I'd be mad, but I saw it coming. I don't even want my money back, it's just a terrible game. The animations, the character models, the combat, the actual gameplay. I cannot describe how bad this is. I felt nothing while playing it. Maybe this is the Old Gods' attempt to bring us all down a notch?

Edward Carnby rolls over in his grave. Original dev team puts a bounty out, all of $5. Stand in light, lose massive frames, lag out, rinse repeat

The original had a great story, great puzzles, if it aint broke dont fix it. These get worse and worse as time goes on.

Even when it is free, and it will be at this rate of dropping prices for a game that just came out, pass it by, give the steam refund center a chance to breath :)

Currently I can't recommend this to anyone, fan or not it's a disjointed game right now. I bought this to participate in the Beta and not much had really changed since them aside from more stable animations I guess. Key binding is missing some functions, bugs that make it so you can't progress, hit detections making enemies bullets spunges, lack of sounds (not even footsteps in some places, no chat function for teammates (mic is the only means to talk to one another). It has potential but it's not there right now.

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I pre-ordered this game, hoping for it to be a decent L4D clone with Alone in the Dark elements. I know that's not what most (if any) AitD fans wanted, and I can understand that. When this game released it was a broken, buggy, clunky, terrible mess. I uninstalled it and moved on when the devs stopped posting on the forum and disappeared for a few months.

However, just the other day I noticed the game had received two patches since I last played, and the most recent one from October was pretty big. They claimed to have reworked basically everything, added voiced narration, new enemies, AI, "advancement" (not sure what that one means), among other things. It's a pretty long list. They also added a new map/mode called Escape. I'll go into that later in this review.

I'm surprised they even patched the game, they seemed to have gotten their initial purchases and ran off with the money. I figured they were doing what 90% of Early Access developers end up doing. So I'm very surprised to see that they didn't give up on the game and they continued to attempt to fix this game.

While it's not in the best shape still, it's still a bit buggy and the AI gets stuck around corners occasionally, the overall game feels better and more fun. A good third of my playtime is most likely just from dealing with the launch bugs, but during the 3 hours I played tonight I only ran into one (which is one that was in the game at launch as well. It involves placing a battery in an elevator. If you run into this, you have to be very careful while placing it and try aiming around until you get a blue highlight around the outline of where each battery goes).

The new mode, called Escape, only has one map in a trailer park, but I really enjoyed it and I hope that we'll see more of it in the future. You have to escape from the (very large) trailer park map by either starting up a boat, repairing a Humvee, or calling in a helicopter from a radio. To do any of these you'll need to go underground and find a large machine that burns ore into electricity. You then use that to power different sections of the map. You'll want to do this so that you can use the lights around those sections of the map to burn enemies (since it's a lot easier to kill enemies when they're being hit by light sources). However, the more sections you have turned on, the faster your energy meter goes down. Once that's empty you'll need to fill that machine up with more ore.

It took me about 20-30 minutes to beat it my first time solo. I could see this being a lot more fun with more players running around and maybe have one guy stay in the tunnels to keep putting ore in the machine.

Having to power different sections of the map was a pretty unique little addition to what otherwise is a mode we've seen in plenty of other games.

If I had reviewed this game about a year ago I'd have given it a huge thumbs down. As it is now, I am leaning much more towards recommending the game, especially if you can pick this up for cheap. At the moment, during the Steam Winter Sale, it's $3, and that seems like a very reasonable price for a decently entertaining co-op shooter that should last you a good chunk of hours if you attempt to beat every level. The first campaign alone should last you two or three hours, and there's three campaigns in total here (not counting the Escape map, which is pretty replayable it seems).

Hopefully the developers will continue supporting this game and working on it, because what they have here is a pretty fun co-op shooter with AitD elements. I'd love to see them do more with this Escape mode.

It's too bad Atari kicked this game out the door way too early, because if they had had another year to polish this I think it would've done a lot better review and sales-wise.