I Am Alive is a rather tough game to critique. There are several moments where I thought to myself “Man, if only they had a bigger budget they could have…”, only to remember that this game did start out with a bigger budget. It was originally a large and ambitious blockbuster game, but difficulties with the original development studio forced Ubisoft to tackle the game at a smaller scale. To step back and figure out what could be salvaged, and release it as a downloadable title.

I admire that approach, as many other studios would have simply released a shoddy game at $60 ($40 if we were lucky). Instead, Ubisoft made it a digital download game and put it out there at $15.

A fun, eight hour game for $15? It’s really hard to argue with that price.

If anything, it makes me wonder how much emphasis we put on the price of the game, or in some cases even the hype. I’ve seen complaints that the game lacks many of the features promised at the game’s announcement, bringing to my mind complaints that Fable was a terrible game since it lacked many of the features Molyneux discussed when it was simply know as Project Ego. Instead of actually analyzing what is in the final product, players and critics alike would tear the game apart for what wasn’t there.

It almost feels as if you must lack any prior knowledge of the game in order to come at it fairly, though once again that brings about the whole pricing bias. If a game only cost you $15 then it’s easier to forgive its flaws, especially if the story takes roughly as long as many games released at the $60 price point. The game then feels like a bargain, and any flaws it has are forgiven for being a budget title.

So here I am, wanting to forgive I Am Alive for all its flaws because I know it was supposed to be a larger budget title that ran into difficulties. I want to forgive it because they released it at $15 while clearly trying to make a good game. I want to forgive it because I had a really good time for a really low price.

Yet in order to forgive I must first acknowledge that the game has flaws that require forgiveness.

I’m not usually one to bring up a game’s graphics, but this is one of those occasions where it actually has a negative effect on the game itself. Not in the manner that the character models or environments look terrible, though. Everything looks completely fine in that regard. What is distracting and often annoying is how they handle draw distance. I imagine it’s a result of trying to make everything look like there’s a layer of dust settled everywhere, but even at the game’s start and indoors things become oddly blurred. Objects five feet away will look as if they’re being filtered through a stain-glass window, or perhaps the bottom of a beer bottle. It’s not fuzzy, and saying that it is blurry isn’t completely accurate, but objects start to blend out of focus and become unclear.

This is different that later parts of the game where dirt and dust begins to settle over everything. The draw distance in those situations doesn’t seem so bad. Silhouettes will become unclear, you won’t be sure whether they’ll be friend or foe, and if they’re aggressive then you won’t be certain what sort of weaponry they carry. It’s fantastic for those later outdoor sections that are focused on survival. Yet when you’re indoors and objects five or ten feet from you are unclear, it becomes rather irritating. It’s as if the game has a permanent filter on that they never bothered to adjust to fit your surroundings.

That’s not to say it is irritating in all situations, however. There are simply plenty of areas, particularly underground or in buildings, where seeing across the room should be perfectly clear and yet people or objects are out of focus and unclear. This pulls the player out of the game, and suddenly the effect is even noticed in scenes and situations where it actually belongs. It is jarring to see something like that.

Not jarring enough to really interfere, however. Most situations you’ll still have a good enough idea of what you’re looking at, and the situations where it inhibits the player’s senses are the scenes where it makes the most sense.

This is because all the gameplay elements of I Am Alive are designed to push towards one simple emotion: desperation. You’re never supposed to feel comfortable, to feel as if everything is going to be okay. You’re meant to be worried that you won’t have enough resources, that you have too few bullets in the chamber of your gun, that you might not have the stamina to climb that building.

This is the first game I’ve ever played that truly felt like a survival horror should*. There is a fear of turning every corner, of entering a room hoping to find new and useful items. There is a reluctance to give up valuable health kits and inhalers and other valuable items to other survivors in exchange for information and “an extra life”. I Am Alive is, perhaps, the best post-apocalyptic survival game I’ve ever played because of these elements.

Unfortunately that has more to do with how poorly other games have attempted to build toward this idea. There are a lot of combat options that I Am Alive is simply missing, a flaw that could easily turn people off to playing the game at all.

Most encounters can be broken down systematically. There will usually be one man with a gun, possibly two. Enemies usually won’t attack until you’ve pulled out a weapon, so it’s best to just wait for them to approach. One of the men with a gun will approach the player, granting the possibility for a surprise attack. That enemy will drop a bullet, giving the player enough ammunition to shoot the other man with the gun. If there is no other man with the gun, then the player is left with any other attackers holding their hands up.

This is where the system can break down if you don’t have the resources. The game allows the player to back enemies onto a ledge or in front of a fire pit if one exists, but this may result in turning your back on other foes and thus opening yourself up to attack. If you don’t have any ammunition, eventually one of the guys will call your bluff and charge. If you try to take him on hand-to-hand, you’ll be wide open for other men to attack and kill you.

In other words, if you don’t have the resources, it is very possible that a player will get stuck in the game and unable to move on. There are ways out of this later, such as gaining the bow and arrow, but it requires little room for error. This is where the “extra lives”, or retries, become a very important part of the game. A player will respawn right outside of where they died with another chance. Use all of your retries and the game will send you all the way back to the last major checkpoint, forcing the player to replay a large chunk of the game.

This system would have been a lot better if it allowed for more freedom. In particular, I wanted Ubisoft to actually combine elements of another game of theirs into I Am Alive. While I wasn’t the most fond of Splinter Cell: Conviction, I did really like the game’s stealth elements. The silhouette indicating your last known location and all the interactive objects in the environment allowed a player to approach a situation from a variety of angles. This is the approach that I Am Alive needed to have but lacked. The ability to hang far back and shoot someone with the arrow, or lighting an object on fire to get enemies distracted. Hell, the very fact that anything outside of fire light is more obscured in shadow in real life grants a lot of opportunities in a game.

While the game eventually grants the player this sort of freedom in the final area of the game, the rest of it is broken down to this system of requiring just enough resources to manipulate the different encounters just right.

This makes the best part of the game “exploration”, a sort of misleading term as the game is actually quite linear. There are plenty of ways to climb a building and make your way about the city, but alternate paths are often blocked off. In a couple of areas the game will pull the camera back and tell you that you’re not supposed to go a certain direction, a blatant rail-roading technique that is bound to suck plenty of players right out. A game shouldn’t tell a player they cannot or aren’t supposed to be doing something. Just allow them to hit a dead end, with that path forward the only option. Even Super Metroid and Legend of Zelda had no problems with this, just allowing the player to figure out which path was ahead of them. Each of those games is linear in a sense, but doesn’t tell the player. They manage to direct the player in a world that deceives them into thinking it is open.

Despite this, they took the climbing mechanics of Assassin’s Creed and imposed limitations on the player. As you climb you grow fatigued, and once you run out of energy the stamina bar starts to decrease. This means when you are at a state of rest, the amount of stamina you can recover is limited. You’ll have much less energy to burn for running, climbing or jumping challenges unless you use an item that restores your stamina.

This makes climbing more of a challenge than simply mapping the path out. It’s not as potentially relaxing an activity as it might be in Assassin’s Creed. The player must now be concerned with which path will burn the least amount of energy, one that is not always so clear from the ground level. There are riposte items that allow the player to take a rest while climbing, but they are extremely rare to find and easy to waste. Many of the buildings are also falling apart, so as you explore in I Am Alive you may find yourself not only racing against your growing fatigue, but also against breaking rebar or poles.

In truth, the most refined part of I Am Alive’s gameplay is the climbing. It is the one aspect of the whole game that could use the least amount of improvement, and most of that is simply allowing the player to have a bit more of an open world**.

Everything else, well, as stated, I’m a bit torn. I know Ubisoft had planned on granting the player more options, such as using resources like water as bait. Allowing the environment to be as much of a hazard for foes as yourself, and being able to trick enemies into a variety of traps. They had these plans but were forced to simplify down. So while I see room for improvement, just as many others do, a lot of these were plans the developers already had.

It’s almost redundant. Telling a developer “Hey, know what would have been better?”, only for them to be looking at the cutting room floor, which they must be wading in up to their hips at this point, and sighing with a “yeah, yeah it would have” whispering from their lips.

I Am Alive could be better, but what we got was still a good game. For $15 it truly is a bargain, especially for a game with such a unique atmosphere that beats a lot of what the $60 games are striving to provide. Imagine what they can do if this game is successful enough to get a sequel?

* I have not yet played Amnesia, the current horror game getting the most praise.

** As many of you know, I actually prefer a more linear experience than an open one, though if they had made it as satisfying as inFamous’ open world I may reconsider.