I Am Alive Hands-On - How It's Like Uncharted, Alan Wake & Fallout 3

You’re probably already aware of I Am Alive’s fall from grace, a AAA disc-based survival game that re-emerged as a downloadable XBLA and PSN game.

Now it's finally here, I Am Alive and Ubisoft Shanghai has to compete with a digital market that is becoming increasingly impressive in terms of quality and innovation.

We’ve played the opening segments of I Am Alive, and here’s how it’s shaping up:

I Am Alive Is Grey

Set in a post apocalyptic world, I Am Alive is wall-to-wall dust and fog. After an event – conveniently the only ambiguous term characters have for whatever disastrous incident occurred – the world has become caked in a thick layer of dust.

The result is a depressing, bleached play environment with little in the way of variety. Even the characters clothes or fires are saturated to the point of lacking any colour whatsoever. It worked for Fallout 3, so it must work for I Am Alive, right?

Finding the right route can be tricky - infuriatingly so at times.

Managing Stamina Is Very Important

Stamina is used for everything, whether it’s shimmying across precarious ledges, holding onto a ladder or jogging: just like life, really.

As you perform actions the stamina will deplete according to the effort required - managing this becomes the crux of the gameplay, adding an almost puzzle-like element to clambering through the apocalypse.

To accompany the significance of a tiring old man is bizarre dramatic music. It’s perhaps understandable hanging over a precipice with minimal grip left, but when running down the street? Climbing over a fence? Not quite life threatening and just a smidge ridiculous.

Search Everywhere For Supplies

It’s survival, right? You’ve got to loot to live, which means searching for painkillers underneath a set of stairs, a soda can on the roof of a lift or a fruit cocktail attached to a broken pipe on the side of a building 100 meters in the air. It’s like a post-apocalyptic game of finders keepers.

How such mundane foodstuffs found their way to the most ludicrous of locations is anyone's guess.

Then there are Retries, collectable… things that give our character a spare life to reattempt whatever it is he’s previously failed. They might be conceptual, but that doesn’t stop them being found in and around the apocalypse, or even rewarded for acts of kindness to strangers.

You'll need to find safe spots during a long climb.

Self-Narration And Camcorder Exposition

Alan Wake’s self-narration didn’t grate on anyone, did it? It didn’t jar with the whole experience and make it seem sillier that it needed to be. No sirree.

At least Alan Wake was mental and had a reason to talk to himself like he was an author. What does I Am Alive’s main character have? A camcorder. And he only uses that as a prop to tell himself what he had for lunch yesterday.

I Am Alive’s Intimidation

It’s a heralded feature of I Am Alive since it resurfaced as an XBLA game, where it is possible to trick enemies into believing you’ll shoot them – either to get them to back off into a convenient pit or so you can get close enough to hit them upside the head.

It seems there’s a bullet ration since the apocalypse, however, because everyone who has a gun only has one bullet. No more, no less. This makes each encounter a puzzle, where you must figure out the correct way of tackling each situation – the solution? Shoot one of them, beat up the rest.

It’s a shame, since in the hands-on demo it wasn’t quite as freeform as we had been led to believe. There’s no more thought to it beyond picking the right enemy to shoot. And why is everyone so aggressive after an apocalypse?

Surprise attacks are important for surviving encounters. Hopefully it keeps its novelty.

Assassin’s Creed Mixed With Fallout

Overall, the hands-on demo with I Am Alive left us with mixed emotions. Graphically it’s sub-par – even for a downloadable game – while the setting is just not utilised as well as it could be.

The parkour elements though – despite not in keeping with the main character at all - are interesting. This is especially true towards the later part of the demo where, scaling the side of a tower, it became necessary to plan the route carefully to ensure it was possible to both reach the top within the stamina limit and collect the nutritious fruit cocktail hanging from a pipe.