The premise is fantastic, flipping between three protagonists who find themselves behind enemy lines unequipped and alone, asking you to scavenge the battlefield in your fight for survival. There's one direct, effective lift though, with Kojima Productions' Yoji Shinkawa - the man behind Metal Gear Solid's exquisite art - working on loan to boost the aesthetic, and this is something that's Left Alive's own it's grubby and dirty with the weight of realism keeping everything rooted to the filth and the rubble.Īnd it's amidst all that there are those tantalising glimmers of promise. Warring factions and political intrigue aren't exactly new to the Front Mission series, sure, but when presented in the context of a stealth action game it can feel too much like a second-rate knock-off. It's bizarre how much Left Alive wants to be Metal Gear Solid there are fudgy treatise on the human cost of war and hard to follow strands of conspiracy theories while familiar audio and visual cues have been seemingly lifted and clumsily pasted over the action. Instead, this is primarily a survival-infused stealth game - think Metal Gear Survive without that game's strong foundations, with a clunky, unreliable moveset and AI adversaries who aren't undead but don't seem to act on any human impulses, and who are either blindly ignorant or supernaturally aware of your presence depending on their own whims. It's helmed by a veteran producer of FromSoft's Armored Core games - another mech series that's been missing in action - though surprisingly given the expertise on tap, as well as the thirst for a decent mech game, the machines remain mostly in the background. This is ostensibly a spin-off of Square Enix's Front Mission, the mech-infused strategy series whose last entry was another spin-off - Double Helix's third-person shooter Front Mission Evolved - some nine years ago. Maybe that's because the promise of its set-up still manages to occasionally shine through the grot. It's a flaky, barely functioning stealth game that's almost entirely awful. Left Alive, meanwhile, takes some fairly rusty, more contemporary mechanics and smothers them in the janky wrappings of a mid-tier PS2 game.
Devil May Cry 5 is a full-blooded return that reimagines Capcom's action formula and delivers it with the muscle and aplomb of the current generation.
Left Alive is the second new release this week that reminds me of a PS2 game, although perhaps the comparisons this time around aren't so favourable. This unlikely Front Mission spin-off's occasional charm can't make up for its seriously broken fundamentals.
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