It’s not that tough, and you can likely burn through the entire thing in under two hours. If the Alien closes in on your location you have to cut power and cause the titular blackout to shut all vent access until it leaves, but the vents re-open automatically so there isn’t much tension. Since the Alien can move lightning fast and enter vents to tunnel around the ship, completely invisibly, the door trick doesn’t work forever. You only need one to survive for a mission to count as a success, so it feels like a half-baked and exploitable victory condition. And, once you reach the later levels there’s no reason not to use some of your crew as bait, aside from some screams from the high-quality voice actors. “What you’ll quickly notice, though, is that the alien’s AI isn’t the best and you can typically keep it distracted in a single room by opening and closing the same door over and over, causing it to run back and forth as you repeatedly give the beast false hope and then crush it. You should expect your muscles to tense up when the alien is spotted or you need a crew member to hurry up and hide, but it’s far from the anxiety-riddled paranoia of other actual survival-horror games. The voice acting is really well done, especially for main character Amanda Ripley (the daughter of Ellen who also starred in 2014’s Alien: Isolation), and there’s quite a lot more story than you’d expect out of a mobile game, even if it is pretty by-the-numbers without any significant hooks or twists. It’s really more of an objective-based, hide-and-seek puzzle game with a sprinkle of scary tension and stress to push you as you direct your ship’s crew to avoid a rampaging xenomorph using a computer terminal that displays them and their pursuer as dots. As a consolation, Alien: Blackout packs decent thrills for a quick playthrough, and its retro-future computer display interface and sound effects fit the tone and atmosphere of the universe perfectly.Calling Alien: Blackout a survival-horror game would be a gross exaggeration. A mobile game in the style of Five Nights at Freddy’s probably isn’t what most people had in mind when excitement for a new Alien game started to stir.