I Am Alive has been released by Ubisoft for both the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Marketplace. Essentially you have an action game in a third-person perspective that takes place in a town that has been hit by an earthquake one year ago. While being surrounded by all the buildings that have been tipped over and the cloud of dust that can kill you if you get caught in it, you’ll be scrounging for supplies, including food and ammunition as means to survive.
Your main character travels to his hometown, Haventon, in search for his wife and daughter. In the next fours hours, you’ll be guiding him in a similar fashion of gameplay as the Uncharted series where you’ll be climbing and jumping around shaky platforms, along with the occasional firing at the enemies. There’s a stamina bar that will deplete whenever you jump, swing around, or shimmy about. Once completely empty, panic will stir up causing your character to rush too quickly to the next platform before plummeting to death.
When you begin the game, you are equipped with your good old gun. But this isn’t your run-and-gun shooting type of game where you can spray bullets without any regards to replenishing them. On the contrary, ammunition is scarce thereby making you become conservative and careful with how you use your weapon. You can always bring up your gun against the people you run into, even if you are out of ammo. In this case, they can end up surrendering and even backing off temporarily. But once you lower your weapon, they’ll be coming for you. So you’ll need to proceed with caution and not make any haste decisions or actions.
But once you do get your weapons working, there are other challenges to overcome. The controls in I Am Alive will take some time to get used to considering how you need to be quite precise when trying to fire at some of your enemies. To make matters worse, shooting isn’t very responsive and can have further delays when you use certain weapons like the bow.
Combat can be enjoyable in the beginning but very quickly they can feel dragged on and even repetitive with constant patterns you come across. You’ll have a group of guys that you’ll have to approach. Ideally, you’ll need to take out one of them as soon as he comes close enough and then fire away at the guy holding the gun in order to keep the survivors from attacking you. It’s the same formula over and over again, which again can become a tedious ordeal.
But not everyone is out there to kill you. Others, when approached, will scream and try to keep away from their so-called valuables. For instance, you’ll come across a man who is guarding a bottle of water. At this point, you’ll need to decide whether to walk away or kill the fool and quench your thirst. There will be various opportunities where you’ll come across these types of situations. And without any police presence, you’re basically free to do anything you want without any legal consequences. But it’s definitely a desperate fight to survive.
The atmosphere in I Am Alive basically gives an isolated and post-apocalyptic impression. However, the graphics does need some improvements as the textures don’t look as smooth while the detail could use some sprucing up. In addition, the voice acting isn’t anything special here.
Overall, I Am Alive offers an exciting and tense experience that shouldn’t be missed. It puts you in a world of people resorting to their animal instincts for survival. For $14.99 or 1200 MSP, you’ll take part in this world and be making decisions on whether to uphold your morals or just do whatever it takes to survive. It may not be the perfect game, but it does have its niche with players looking for some nice suspenseful gameplay.
