Left Alive Review: Gameplay Impressions, Videos and Speedrunning Tips

Left Alive is a good example of the difference between potential and execution in video games.  

Quietly released by Square Enix amid a slew of massive titles, the Front Mission spinoff with captivating artwork thanks to Metal Gear Solid's Yoji Shinkawa falls short on capitalizing on most of its ambition. 

Left Alive is similar to other prominent recent releases in that it feels like a last-generation game with updated graphics—but in the wrong way. While the superb Devil May Cry 5 or Kingdom Hearts 3 falls into these same categories, Left Alive simply doesn't feel like a good throwback. 

Promising an open-ended approach to survival and a story with meaningful decisions, Left Alive has some charm to it that unfortunately can't gloss over a bevy of problems. 

Graphics and Gameplay

Shinkawa's dominant presence is felt throughout. 

From the box art to character design, environments and mechs, this is a Metal Gear-lookalike in the best ways. The visuals truly sell the war-torn landscape well in most instances. 

Fantastic artwork blends into superb character models. But it's an odd marriage, as the characters look great but the environments are spotty, and bad-looking texture problems pop up when really looking for them. At times, the character models, especially in dialogue segments, almost look as if they were ripped out of a more advanced game and set into a lesser one. 

Unfortunately, the mostly good visuals aren't foreshadowing of the gameplay itself. Fitting, as the stage-setting cutscenes and moments to start the story are superb, but something felt off immediately upon gaining control of the player character. 

Unnatural or floaty might be the best words to describe the movement once a player takes control. Sticking to cover isn't guaranteed and neither is scaling or getting over objects. The crouch-run is odd, too. Some of the systems in place don't help the janky feeling. It seems there is a sprint cooldown in place, but players are free to spam a combat roll without end. 

The jarring movement leans right into other areas. Gunplay is floaty as well, with it sometimes feeling like shots aren't going where the reticle is actually pointed. It's difficult to tell which shots are hitting at all, as the game lacks noteworthy feedback. The usual array of guns is available, but it feels like the gameplay with those was intentionally left in a shrug-worthy state to push players into a gadget-based approach. 

General controls are an annoyance at best and downright awful at worst. One button handles three different functions depending on the modifier. The same button that throws a can or grenade also heals depending on what a player has assigned at the current moment. It hurts immersion when a player has to look down and see whether they have a trap, grenade or healing item activated before pressing.

There are plenty of buttons on controllers and keyboards, which is what makes this confusing. Popping up from cover to throw an item and drinking some vodka instead, for example, isn't uncommon, especially early in the proceedings. 

The game promotes the idea of stealth, yet there isn't a clear-cut way to take down enemies that the player character sneaks up behind. In one of the early missions players find a stun gun, which knocks unaware enemies over but doesn't incapacitate them. And silencers on weapons? Forget it. 

Likewise, headshots don't eliminate a target. One could argue they're wearing helmets, which is fine. However, with such an emphasis on being surrounded, outnumbered and needing to use stealth, the lack of an instant-kill hurts the experience for those who want to (understandably) play that way. The same applies for explosives, which knock an enemy over, sure. But those enemies get right back up and they may or may not detect who threw the explosive device at their feet. 

Which leads to another critical problem. 

Enemy AI is all over the place. Sometimes they will spot players from afar. Other times they'll see the player through a wall. Enemies flanking or alerting each other about an intruder is rare, whereas them filing through a door one by one and getting mowed down is not. At one point, standing in a doorway caused the soldiers out in the hall to shoot at the wall where the player character would be—if the wall didn't exist.

Presentation plays a role here too. Red bars on the left, right and top of the screen indicate where enemies are, alongside the never-ending same line from the AI. There isn't a good way to tell if an enemy will detect the player, which becomes an exercise in frustration quickly. At one point on normal difficulty, the character was able to walk right behind a towering mech, close enough to slap its leg, only to go undetected. Right after, turning the corner of a building resulted in getting spotted from a long ways away by a random soldier. 

Actual mech gameplay is fun, at least. Plodding through the streets and fighting other giant enemies is a good time, but it doesn't happen often enough. 

To summarize, there is an unfortunate gameplay loop here. Left Alive wants to bully players into using the crafting and gadget system to full effect. And it sounds great, but given the sheer number of enemy combatants, the problems with varying systems and the lack of consistent kill power given the circumstances, progress is difficult and motivation to mastering scenarios is limited. 

Story and More

Left Alive is compelling from a story and experience perspective. 

The game's setting features opposing countries in the midst of a brutal war. Players take on three characters embroiled in the middle of the occupation, where those invading forces are executing on sight. Without giving too much away, each character has a unique background and goal in the grander scheme of things, with solid cutscenes and story beats fleshing things out along the way. 

The whole premise is amazing, truly. Surrounded, players have to scavenge for supplies, craft IEDs and other devices to fight back and help other survivors along. The story floats between the three characters in sometimes giant war zones peppered with soldiers, tanks, drones and mechs. Dialogue choices have an impact on how it all plays out and players can get through the game how they want. 

Sounds great. 

But the choices thrown at players don't seem to mean much outright. And it's cheesy at points, which isn't an overwhelming negative when done right (looking at you, Devil May Cry 5). Even better, the voice acting is mostly superb, right in line with the clear emphasis on production values for characters. 

But a few layers of details outside of the intriguing plot and circumstances have to get a mention. 

Left Alive has the most annoying mechanic seen in a video game in a long, long time. The accompanying AI will warn the player Caution: The Enemy Is Approaching. It would be fine, except that it does this constantly. It does it when an enemy moves toward the player. But it also does it when the player is moving toward the enemy. It's the only voiced line meant to warn players of enemies in their general vicinity and it never stops saying it. 

Maybe this wouldn't be such an egregious detail if each level wasn't stuffed to the gills with enemies. Ditto for some of the other underlying problems, which will often have players trying levels over and over again. 

Clunky as it is, the crafting is a great idea. There is a large pool of things to create on the fly in an attempt to survive. But again, other games have done it better. Even recent iterations of the Tomb Raider series did it better, asking players to make tougher decisions due to resource scarcity. 

Granted, the UI overall is slick. It pulls off the menu-is-up-and-player-is-vulnerable thing quite well. The red-black design is sleek and offers great feedback, unlike shooting and enemy awareness. 

The map is one of the best in gaming too, as jarring as that might sound here (though a lack of a minimap and having to pull up the whole thing every time is a nuisance). It boasts heat maps, which apparently pull in real-time data to show where players have had the most firefights. Pockets of circles throughout a mission's level are color-coded with alert levels, which can act as a guiding hand to show players what path they should take to an objective. 

Tying into the point about heat maps, players will also come across the bodies of other players who died during a mission. Those are lootable with supposed rare items and coincide with the heat map to show where things might get difficult. It has been done before, but is a superb feature for a game of this ilk. 

Players can also control when survivors attempt to escape from the map too. Overall, this mechanic boils down to meeting a survivor or two in a mission area and choosing whether to help them escape or not. That the map functionality is a bigger talking point about this, though, is an indictment of how tired escort missions are in video games. 

In not-so-surprising fashion for a game that feels as dated as this, Left Alive makes a massive misstep with its save system, too. There is an auto-save feature working in the background at points, but primary means to record progress is at sparse save stations located throughout a level. Given all of the problems detailed above, this means redoing the same actions consistently, oftentimes because of the game's problems, which leads to an annoying gameplay loop, at a minimum.

As a whole, Left Alive wants the player to experience it more than once. There is a new game+, which allows for more powerful runs of the game thanks to points earned on the initial playthrough that unlocked skills. This allows for a chance at different endings and simply feeling more powerful, which lends itself to potentially saving more survivors and experimentation with new ways to play. The option for immense replayability is a nice touch. 

Speedrunning Tips

Left Alive would have a well of speedrunning potential on its hands if it didn't have so many issues. And even then, it might cobble together a dedicated community of runners thanks to its very nature and replayability. 

Indeed, watching someone skillfully weave through the levels in varying manners might serve as a great viewing experience as opposed to playing it. 

For those looking to speedrun, it's going to come down to how cheesy they want to get. Going about it legitimately without abusing mechanics will come down to smartly picking and choosing battles, stockpiling resources as they go for when the game decides to throw them into a fight they can't avoid. 

It's going to be faster to craft remote-controlled explosives as opposed to trip mines. And learning how to craft on the fly from the item wheel instead of popping open all the menus will shave some serious time off a run. So too will general memorization of the levels and basic speedrun mechanics like skipping cutscenes and dialogue. 

Again, a certain amount of cheese will speed up runs as well. Enemies, at least on the lower two difficulties, seem to have a hard time hitting players who spam the combat roll. It isn't impossible to roll throughout an entire open-world section while detected to get to an objective, which immediately pops up a cutscene and moves on to the next thing. 

Experimentation over a long period of time unearths the best way to run games like this. The type of run, whether it's 100 percent or just to the end, will also play a role. So will whether it's the initial playthrough or a powered-up character with bonuses. 

Conclusion

Left Alive simply didn't come together the way expectations might have suggested. 

At times it feels like a PS2 or PSP game with souped-up graphics. These issues, from the sloppy controls to the horrific enemy AI and beyond, popped up years ago and were refined countless times over. 

There is a charm to double-A games in today's market. And there is a massive, massive gap where games like Splinter Cell and even Metal Gear Solid used to stand tall. Left Alive scratches some of these itches at times, but many of the mechanics and general clunkiness make it feel outdated. 

Filled to the brim with great ideas that clearly have some traction among gamers right now, Left Alive is a solid try that feels behind the times and unable to catch up this time out.