I am Alive

Ah, this game. A 15 dollar price tag, an original premise, a hyped up release. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, besides the developer's 'Fuck You' to PC gamers, it switching hands mid development to Ubisoft, and basically being a game made in 2008 released in 2012 not much.

The game takes place in an apocalyptic city where you play as an unnamed protagonist whom of course has a family which is now missing which consists of a daughter and wife. Like we haven't seen this scenario in movies before.

Anyways, let's start with the appeal to our eyes, or rather, gray marker being jabbed into our eye sockets repeatedly.

If Fallout 3 bothered you with that nasty green tone, I am Alive will be much, much worse.

I don't understand the recent obsession in games today being brown and gray all over. This effect is not fun for people who like to play games for extended periods of time. Some people may defend this as being an 'art style'. The PC version has some minor flickering. And all this would be acceptable if not for the issue that the game has early 360 graphics. The AA is awful, and the game doesn't appear to take advantage of any of DX 10/11's features.

The animations are just flat out silly. At one point in the game you will carry a girl on your back whom doesn't move, at all. The running animations aren't great, when aiming your hand shakes but the gun magically stays still. The climbing is.. okay Occasionally the protagonist will speak without his mouth even moving.


Just a mess all around graphically, but more importantly, is the gameplay good?

Well that's a mixed answer, the game has climbing a little similar to Uncharted, except actually I'd say it's more interesting due to the stamina system. It's a little hard to see where you're going when you're climbing which is both nice and bad, it's incredibly frustrating when your health is slowly being drained by a dust storm and you are repeatedly dying without seeing a pipe to climb, but it's also nice that it isn't as obvious as Assassin's Creed.

The human interaction in the game is actually pretty interesting. I was fairly both impressed and amused by it, at first anyways. You start the game out with a pistol with no ammo. Eventually gaining new weapons such as a machete and bow. The game is by no means a shooter, so if you were expecting to be leaning out from walls to shoot mutants you're in the wrong place. Many of the characters in the game will be looters who simply want your gear, and there is occasionally a way to change up how to handle the situation.You can choose to let them approach you ready to pat you down for supplies and whip out your machete, or you can take out your gun and try to get them to surrender or tell them to back off to the edge of cliff and kick them off.

Although these are very cool ideas at first, it becomes extremely repetitive after a while. And it's more so frustrating when you attempt to save a bullet by killing someone with the machete but actually don't have it as a possibility since the developers decided you HAVE you shoot someone.

Now, if the checkpoints weren't occasionally awful and you didn't have a limited number of retries this wouldn't be so bad. And well, it's not quite as cool as it sounds.

Press 'E' to pull out your machete, then spam click 'LMB' to win the QTE. Fun Fun Fun.

Although I was highly amused the first encounter you have no ammo, and the man approaching you would back off if you pull your gun out. My game was bugged the first time and he wouldn't actually walk backtowards the pit, and I ended up pulling the trigger only to hear a 'click'. Where the looter would remark 'Hey, that's empty!' and proceed to chase me down and kill me with me not actually being able to do anything at that point.

The controls are a little awkward and feel like there's input lag on the mouse. But otherwise I had minimal trouble with climbing or fighting.

The Music is okay. It's nice sounding but it's just dumb having dramatically urgent music playing when I run around my apartment. The voice acting was fairly decent. I'd rate it at least above Skyrim's acting though that isn't saying much. The guns don't sound that nice, and cutting someone's throat with a machete shouldn't sound like scissors cutting paper.

The story kind of falls apart with no real premise. You kind of just end up like a teenager with ADD and wander around doing whatever is next. The ending wasn't that great, I won't spoil it if you plan on actually picking this up.

So, to wrap things up.

+The game is 15 bucks
+It has some original elements
+There aren't many PC games with decent climbing controls
+Can keep you interested just to see what you'll get to do next, spreads out new abilities well

-Ugly
-Story isn't strong enough to keep me playing just to see what happens
-Combat is silly
-Checkpoints can be unforgiving

6/10.