Dead By Daylight: Alien trailer confirms playable Ripley, unique map elements
Nostromo the merrier
Behaviour Interactive have shared more details of the Alien expansion for asymmetrical PVP affair Dead By Daylight, which adds Giger's celebrated hoover-faced menace to the game's line-up of playable horror movie villains. I've never played Dead By Daylight - going by my Among Us stats, I make a pretty shambolic assassin and besides, the whole impale-people-on-hooks sacrifice mechanic is just so urrrgh - but I will always play an Alien game, and Behaviour's take on the xenomorph is intriguing.
That's perhaps less to do with the monster itself - which has a Runner Mode Power that lets it scuttle stealthily on four legs, reducing the Terror Radius at which its presence will be highlighted - as with how the expansion changes this fiendishly one-sided multiplayer experience. It accompanies a new map based on the film's Nostromo spacecraft, and a new interactive map fixture: control stations, which can be used by the Alien and each round's scurrying human survivors in different ways.
The survivors can use control stations to acquire a remote flame turret that staggers and slows the Alien, but also needs to be repaired when it overheats. The Alien, meanwhile, can enter the tunnel mouth beneath each control station, accessing a special map sublevel, unique to this Dead by Daylight map, which lets it pop up from unexpected angles, as should be the aim of any self-respecting xenomorph. You can get a glimpse of all that in the trailer. Also in the trailer: her majesty Ellen Ripley, who joins the cast of Survivors. And Jonesy the Cat, who is of course the actual villain of the film. I hope he gets what's coming to him.
While I missed out on Dead By Daylight, I did find time to play Behaviour's Meet Your Maker, a jolly exercise in constructing rusty death labyrinths for other players to invade. I wonder if they've piped any learnings from that project's map-creator community back into Dead By Daylight? It's certainly a game that understands the value of a well-placed flamethrower.