Aliens: Dark Descent

Aliens: Dark Descent is a 2023 real-time tactics game set in the Alien film universe. A xenomorph outbreak has spread across a mining moon, and a ship of Colonial Marines stranded there has to contain it. You send a squad of four marines into each map, from a base on the ship, and bring them back alive if you can.

The squad moves as one unit in real time. Giving orders slows the action down, a slow motion close to a pause, while you assign shots, abilities and positions. Marines accumulate stress, which makes them miss and panic, and they can be wounded, traumatised or killed for good. Each day that passes on the campaign makes the infestation worse.

It is one of the few big modern games that is real-time squad tactics with something close to a pause and a full campaign around it. The atmosphere is excellent: motion tracker beeps, sentry guns, welding doors shut, and the moment you decide to leave a map before the squad breaks. Stress and fatigue make retreat a real tactic.

The controls take time to learn, as the squad is ordered as a group rather than one soldier at a time. Some found the campaign long and its base management thin.

Dark Descent keeps X-COM's structure, base, campaign, squad and permanent loss, and plays the missions in real time with slow motion instead of turns. It is closer to X-COM: Apocalypse and UFO: Aftermath than to the Firaxis games, and the best modern evidence that the real-time version of the X-COM idea works.