Aliens: Dark Descent – Newcomers Tips

Starter Tips

• You’re suppose to only fight when you absolutely have to. For the bulk of the depoyments avoiding detection is key and lack of ammo can be sorta countered by havin gmarines with the resourcful trait, Just take your time and creep up if thigns get too hectic there’s some mods on nexus that’ll tone things down. A mod that makes it so welding doors is a command point ablility instead of needing tools dial it down a few notches.
• Usually in the last stop of a mission you’re more fighting your way through but using sentries and mines and deployable motion trackers you can sorta set traps for the patroling xenos to make room.
• Make sure you have command points to use your special abilities. At first I thought this was a stealth leaning game but you can take the bugs head on. It’s really quite fun.
• Also strategic retreat. If the heat is too high in the caves on mission one, draw back to the ship and try again later.
• Do you remember the movie where the aliens got slaughtered like bugs coming down the long corridor, but murked the heroes when they got ambushed in small rooms? That’s the name of the game – the long corridor. If you fight them up close, you’ll get hit. Sometimes you have no choice, but as far as you can, use the long corridor. If you’re in alert mode, and they sent aliens, stay in a long corridor.
• Mission 1 is very rough. Hardly any ammo, and your marines accuracy are all bad. Just complete the bare minimum and bug out. Take the collectables later on.
• Mission 2 onwards has massive piles of ammo everywhere, so is becomes a non-issue. You get accuracy upgrades, traits, weapons, etc. So you end up saving a lot of ammo.
• Also, anything more than 2 aliens, you need a sentry gun, even in the longest corridors. You can do 3 in a pinch, and with fully upgraded gunners, maybe 4 in a very long corridor with suppressive fire, but its easier to throw down a sentry.
• When they start alerts, kill the first wave, then run into any rooms and corridors you know aliens are patrolling (You can see from the blips), kill them all, as many as you can – that way, you take down most of them in a single alert, and don’t raise the threat meter too much.
• Also, shotgun is very good, better than incinerator (which is good for eggs and facehuggers mostly). Use it often, and use it well.
• When your marines are have a single stress bar, just weld up a room and rest, too many conditions make them very inefficient.
• The moment the alert level goes to hard, your only mission is to extract.
• Later in the game you can also take out single Aliens silently and not alert the others.