I Am Alive

Dead On Arrival

Ubisoft’s I Am Alive is a self-styled survival horror/exploration game set in a post-apocalyptic world brought about by an earthquake and subsequent sharp spike in dust and localized levels of muddled brown and gray.  In game, you play as an unnamed man searching the city for his lost wife and daughter.  Along the way you pick up a helpless little girl, help out a cripple and otherwise do nothing of any terrible significance.

The short version is that this is a game with decent enough ideas that could hardly be executed in a way that was any less fun to play or less fulfilling as an experience.

Without getting too heady and theoretical, the big problems with I Am Alive seem to stem from a fundamentally flawed perspective: this is a game that desperately wants to take itself seriously, and it wants even more desperately to be realistic.  However, before the game can even start to pick up speed, this creates the crippling problem that there’s not really any fun to be had here.

Take the exploration as an example.

I Am Alive tries to emphasize the difficulty of scraping out an existence in a post-apocalyptic setting by making resources rare and potential sources thereof (i.e. non-essential back alleys, extra rooms, etc.) plentiful.  On paper this sounds good, but in execution it really just makes things more frustrating as the player walks or runs from empty alleys to empty rooms, with nothing to show for it more often than not.

What’s more, basic tasks like running and climbing are tied to a stamina bar that runs out quicker than a bottle of lighter fluid in a bonfire, and once the meter is depleted, its capacity starts to decrease as a cost to continued use.  For running around this works fine and well, but in the numerous and essential climbing sections it comes across as more torturous and tedious than challenging, as limited stamina forces the player to move at a set speed along the set route or die in the attempt.

If the game were willing to live in the 21st century and give you fairly frequent autosave points and enough (read: unlimited) retries to figure out what its tedious, exact and unforgiving climbing path is, this wouldn’t be problem.

Instead, I Am Alive takes the one cue from 80s gaming that no one would want it to and implements a life system.  Lose all of your lives and, as befits games of 20 and 30 years ago, you can look forward to painfully, tediously and meaninglessly retreading your steps from the beginning of the chapter.

All of this could perhaps be forgivable if the environments through which the player toils were somehow engaging or, god forbid, beautiful, but instead I Am Alive opts for a tired palette of colors as vast and varied as black, gray and brown.

Still, these grievous sins could be forgiven if the gameplay or the story were engaging.

But the story of finding your wife and daughter while helping a little girl and a cripple survive the apocalypse and all the mean people who want to take their food falls flatter than a pancake, and it’s such a painfully tired retread of standard post-apocalyptic western-style good guy angels versus depraved evil demon people tropes that it’s exhausting to watch and difficult to care about in the slightest.

Furthermore, the gameplay boils down almost exclusively to the exploring, running, jumping and climbing that is so thoroughly hampered by the aforementioned stamina system.  There is a combat system, but combat is so cumbersome and dangerous that it often comes out to create more of a resigned state of anticipated health loss than an anticipation of a difficult challenge.  Ammo is scarce, and dispensing of more than one enemy with your machete is a perilous matter, to say the least, so you can usually predict to lose most of your health in any encounter that involves more than 2 or 3 combatants.

One thing I noticed here was particularly annoying: the player finds bullets with all the amazing frequency of a presidential election, and in this the game does actually tend to create a sense of tension on whether or not you should use ammo or do your best to save it.  However, as I see it this sense is shattered and made all the more exasperating by any and all enemies who are themselves toting guns.  They fire rounds with all the reckless abandon of Rambo, and in a world so intent on being morose and sparse, its jarring when every enemy with a gun has just as many bullets as he needs to shoot you down, whether that’s one or fifteen.

The Verdict: Thumbs all the way down.

I hate to say it, but this is really just a fundamentally bad game.  It’s difficult for the simple sake of being difficult, poorly written, poorly put together, boring to look at and boring to play.  I say avoid this one and don’t let your wallet touch it with a thirty-nine and a half foot pole