LEFT ALIVE
In this stealth game everyone’s out for your hide
The setting immediately evokes a tense atmosphere: wrecked cars; blood splatters on the walls; various fires the only source of light. You find yourself in the city of Novo Slava, where everyone was preparing for Christmas just before the neighbouring republic of Garmonia attacked, their giant Wanzer mechs flattening everything in sight. Now it’s up to you to make it out alive somehow rather than to save the day.
As it turns out, in Left Alive just getting around the next corner unscathed is almost impossible. It has clearly been designed to be a difficult game, in order to escalate your feeling of powerlessness in the face of an overwhelming foe. The actual foe, however, is the controls coupled with completely unpredictable AI behaviour.
You play as three different characters in this war-torn world, searching for allies, freeing civilians, and – most importantly – surviving. The atmosphere established early on doesn’t last, partly because Left Alive doesn’t look great. Textures and colours are the streaky grey of a cloudy afternoon, making it hard to tell items and enemies apart at a distance. Meanwhile, your opponents seem to be able to see you from anywhere – turn the camera towards them while your character is hidden and they will spot you and open fire immediately. If you manage to get the drop on a lone enemy there is no quiet way to dispatch them; instead you empty an entire magazine of bullets into them, alerting even their deaf gran in the process.
SQUALID SNAKE
Elsewhere, soldiers helplessly shoot at the cars in front of them when they see you, and if you manage to throw a Molotov cocktail accurately at a group of enemies (which, due to the aforementioned visuals, feels like throwing with your eyes closed) they will be drawn to it like moths to a flame.
Bugs and controls that make your DualShock feel like a forklift undermine a sound concept. Sneaking for your life until you finally make it into the cockpit of a Wanzer for some action-filled combat is a great idea. Left Alive also gives you a wide arsenal of items to craft, from small explosives to enemy sensors. Escorting survivors and making moral decisions at certain points in the story are fresh concepts that would bring some muchneeded realism to the genre if they weren’t hampered by bugs.
Despite your best efforts, you end up dying so many times that survival loses all its meaning. Instead, Left Alive is a game about stubbornly going through the motions. Any satisfaction is short-lived when exceedingly rare autosaves can cost you up to half an hour of progress. Attached to the Front Mission series and prolific talent such as Metal Gear character designer Yoji Shinkawa, Left Alive was slanted to be the next big thing in stealth since Metal Gear, but the promise stayed hidden.
VERDICT
“TEXTURES AND COLOURS MAKE IT HARD TO TELL ITEMS AND ENEMIES APART.”
Left Alive is most disappointing because it had such potential to revitalise the stealth genre. Instead you get something far behind even the titles it tries to emulate. Malindy Hetfeld