Developer: Ubisoft Shanghai and Darkworks

Publisher: Ubisoft

Genre: Survival horror

Rating: 18

Release date: March 7, 2012 (XBLA)

After years of waiting Ubisoft have finally released their post disaster game I Am Alive. Now let’s see if the game was a success or like the games setting a disaster.

I Am Alive follows Adam who is returning to the city of Haventon after a cataclysm referred to as “The Event”. The reason why Adam is going to the destroyed city is to find his wife and daughter who were in the city during the event.

The game has two bars one called stamina which is used up when climbing or in heavy dust and if lose all your stamina you have a QTE option to drain an emergency stamina bar to try and reach a place to stand, but draining this emergency bar reduces your overall stamina after it recharges when you stop climbing, but you can use items you find to counter this for example pitons can be used when climbing to recover your stamina or you can items to recharge your emergency bar. The second bar is your health bar which does not regenerate automatically and only restores when you complete a mission or through healing items.

What makes I Am Alive a competent survival game is the fact you have limited supplies and supplies are incredibly difficult to find and as such leaves you playing causally. While supplies are limited you can use specific items to help survivors for example an elderly couple on a building will ask for a bottle of wine which you may have come across and give it to them. I would recommending helping survivors as you will receive some useful information and/or an extra retry which can come in handy.

The retry system work by giving you 3 retries or lives at the start of each new mission and if you lose all 3 lives during a mission you have to start the mission from the beginning again and so getting as many retries as possible is advisable.

The plot as you can guess from above is about Adam trying to find his family and for the first hour or so that does seem to be the case, but after visiting the family’s house the plot falls apart. After leaving the house you help a young girl which begins a new mission to help her and her family escape the city. While Adam does mention why he is in the city several times he seems more content to help the family he just met then find his own. The redeeming quality of the plot is the recordings from the camcorder that is being watched at the start of the game as the give the game a more human feeling. The end scene also gives some closure.

While the plot ends up not being that great the city of Haventon makes up for it a bit. You can explore nearly every part of the city by climbing up the sides of building and walking along partly destroyed tracks etc. During the game you do get a hook to swing across large gaps, but this is only used in specific events set by the game. The city also holds many dangers which include various gangs of people trying to survive and who will stop at nothing for supplies and another danger is the dust on the ground level which slowly drains your stamina.

Combat in I Am Alive is pretty much all about timing because 90% of the time you are outnumbered and out gunned. The weapons you have are a pistol, machete and a bow (which is unlocked later in the game); the pistol is good for quick firing, machetes for QTE kills and the bow for long range kills. Ammo is extremely limited with the most amount of ammo I personally had was 5 rounds for my pistol and two arrows for my bow, ammo is a rare commodity so try to use your machete when possible. The enemies you fight are easy enough to dispatch when you think through it properly, but if you are heavily outnumbered it might take a few tries.

Getting hurt in I Am Alive can be an annoyance because the screen goes more and more red the lower your health bar goes (basically bloody screen). When I got the bloody screen for the first time it did hurt my eyes and so the bloody screen felt a bit over the top and could have being done better in my opinion.

The game looks graphically nice with gritty colours to good effect to show how lifeless and lawless the city has become after the disaster.

For those who like an extra challenge I Am Alive has a survivor mode which offers less ammo, items and no retries are returned when you complete a mission.

It took me about 6 hours to complete I Am Alive.

Score: 72%

I Am Alive is a fun game, but the change in storyline near the beginning of the game was a bit of a put off. The combat while good can be a bit annoying especially when it can sometimes be 4 V 1 and you only have 2 bullets. I personally enjoyed the climbing and exploration in the game.