I Am Alive: Ubisoft's store-brand knockoff of a survival action game.

I never really cared for post-apocalyptic stuff. That stereotypical dystopia of derelict cities fighting off some zombie horde or devastating dust storm while people living in squalor... It all felt a bit too played out to me. Considering what’s happened in the past few years with us living through a global pandemic, I can't say I'm really interested in playing too many things that hit a bit too close to reality. 

That doesn’t mean I never play those kind of games. I've played stuff like Fallout 3 and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead which take place in dystopian worlds and yet still enjoyed them. But it's definitely not something I actively seek out.

Yet, I decided to start 2023 by playing a game that took place in a post-apocalyptic world. One that was recommended to me as something interesting, but fairly clunky. And as you're gonna learn, feels like the low quality knockoff store brand of something you'd buy.

(As opposed to what, dead?)

I Am Alive – a title that while grammatically correct, still sounds weird to my ears – is an action survival game published by Ubisoft and developed by Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio. Released in March 2012 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and later the PC through Steam; the game was one of those post-apocalyptic games, coming out just as the survival action genre was starting to take off.

Originally announced as just Alive in 2008, I Am Alive was being developed at Darkworks, a French studio who had done other similar games, such as the interesting survival horror game Cold Fear and the mostly-forgotten Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. 

After an initial trailer showing a player surviving a catastrophic event in Chicago, Illinois, the game went dark, with only occasional news reports of the game still being alive (no pun intended). After countless delays, the game was rumored to be canceled until Ubisoft moved the development in-house around 2010, while also shifting the game’s focus from a major retail title to a smaller digital-only title. Darkworks shuttered its doors not long after.

Unless some Darkworks developer held on to some unfinished development code, this particular version of I Am Alive is presumably lost, with only some proof of concept trailers still available online.

Even after moving development to Ubisoft Shanghai, they opted to take Darkworks' concept and start completely fresh, basically making a new game under the same name. Let's see how well they did.

(An interesting way to start: A lady watching found film footage of some dude. Sure this isn't The Blair Witch Project?)

In I Am Alive, we're introduced to Our Hero, a boring, run-of-the-mill dude protagonist whose name is never mentioned. For some reason, I thought his name was “Ethan,” but all the sources I checked have him unnamed, so he'll be named Our Hero going forward. 

After The Event – the nebulous term the game uses for the apocalyptic event that ravaged the country – Our Hero returns to Haverton, a fictitious New York-like locale. He goes to find his wife and daughter – who do have names unlike Mr. Unknown here – but after finding that they're not home, Our Hero then gets wrapped up in a journey that involves reuniting other families, getting supplies, and taking advice from various strangers around Haverton to eventually escape out of this hellhole.

(Ezio Auditore he ain't.)

The tutorial level has Our Hero climbing on a bridge, which introduces us to the core movement and platforming mechanics. Our Hero has a stamina bar that drains whenever the player does anything action-heavy like climbing and sprinting. Running out of stamina will cause the player to start panicking, forcing a quick time event to rapidly climb to a safe area while shrinking the maximum stamina the player can have. 

Both stamina and the stamina reserve can be refilled by items acquired in the world, which is critical if one uses up too much stamina to complete an area and suddenly has a lower stamina threshold. Our Hero can also use safety pitons while climbing to give the player a safe haven to catch their breath without needing to find somewhere to climb up, but this seemed unnecessary as the inventory system can be opened even while climbing. Still though, I can give them some credit.

(Gee, these little ledges here seem quite convenient...)

The movement controls in this game are similar to how they work in Assassin’s Creed games. Our Hero can jump, grab onto ledges, and climb up and down with the left/right mouse button (or LT/RT if you're playing with a gamepad.)

However, this leads to the problem I often called the “Not that way, you idiot!” problem, where sometimes Our Hero will climb back to an area rather than moving forward, or constantly shimmy back and forth rather than going down the pipe right in front of them. This is something that plagued several of the Assassin’s Creed titles, and they're just as annoying here. You think with several games under your belt that you’d make sure you’d refine the movement to be a little more fluid, but I guess if it ain’t broke…

(Hope you weren't using up first ai- sorry, "1st aid kits," because then you can't help out people and get some useless item that doesn't give much incentive to do it.)

Haverton is populated with locations to visit and folks to meet, some of which Our Hero meets by chance to progress. While this may give the illusion of Haverton being a free-roaming world with areas to visit, the game is a bit more linear than expected. Indeed, there were a handful of points where the game told me I was going the wrong way, which made me wonder why there was a world to roam around in the first place. A fair share of areas are mostly locked off until Our Hero does something to advance the plot or unlocks a new item, akin to a Metroid game.

While there’s folks the protagonist can meet, often times they’re just there to give stories nobody really remembers. They can give Our Hero some items, but that's all they're useful for. Sometimes they give you some tale about what happened during The Event but these people are so inconsequential that I swear they used the same models for enemies as they did for regular folks.

(Is post-apocalyptic dust the new distance fog?)

A fair share of the ground level outside Haverton is stuck with dust from The Event that makes it hard to see and slowly kills the player’s stamina if he stays in it. This slows down the pace of the game a bunch as there’s little time to explore, requiring the player to find higher ground to regenerate stamina before continuing. Eventually Our Hero finds a gas mask that slows down the process of losing stamina while in the dust, but I didn’t get it until I was really late in the game, not really needing it to explore at this point.

(Hope you like mashing the mouse buttons.)

While Our Hero will be mostly climbing and walking, this is a survival game, and what’s a survival game without a bit of combat? Our Hero gets a machete early on to use it to attack enemies. If the player gets spotted and can get an enemy close enough to them, he can do a quick kill with a simple button press. Otherwise he can get into a “Struggle Kill” quick time event to finish them off. This can be helpful, but when there’s many people this becomes impossible to do as the player can be broken out of the QTE if they take any damage.

(The game suddenly goes into first-person whenever Our Hero pulls out a weapon. I assume this is a relic from Darkworks’ version of the game, which mostly took place in first-person.)

This is where the firearms come in. Our Hero can pull out a pistol and threaten melee enemies to either move them into position to be kicked off a ledge, or make them surrender. However, some enemies can also have guns, which makes them priority number one when tackling groups. This too can lead to issues as any enemy can grab the pistol off a downed foe unless you’re quick at the draw. Since bullets are incredibly scarce, it’s important to prioritize who to attack. Sometimes the player can even sneak around and do finishing moves, but I only did this a few times as every other enemy encounter starts by them already spotting me.

By default the game will automatically aim towards the torso of the nearby target, of which one can quickly change targets with the mouse, which in parts of my playthrough caused Our Hero to constantly switch targets until he got hit repeatedly and died. 

It took me several tries to even figure out there was a precision aiming feature for more precise aiming onto limbs, which is critical to fighting certain foes later in the game. This really feels like a holdover from the original console version, and it feels incredibly clunky and unnecessary here on PC. I'm playing this with a traditional mouse and keyboard setup, I should just be able to aim anywhere without needing a dedicated button to do that.

(Was this coming out during The Year of the Bow or something? Seems like tons of games around this time were bow-heavy.)

At some point Our Hero can get a bow to take out targets but isn’t as threatening as the handgun is, and a shotgun through helping out an unseen ally inside the dust cloud. While you can scavenge arrows and handgun bullets around the world, the shotgun has one five-round tube magazine, as far as I could tell. I often saved them for the big armored dudes that start appearing later in the game.

(This whole thing seems unnecessary.)

Finally, the game has an unusual checkpoint system. Losing all health results in using a "retry," and the player can get more retries – which are video cameras, fitting with the found footage approach to the story – by helping out people in the world by giving them items or making progress in a mission. Run out of retries and the player’s sent back to the last major checkpoint.

I can see what they were trying to do with this: Give a bit of weight to the player’s decisions by trying to make them think about how to engage certain areas, knowing that running out of retries may mean restarting whole sections of a level. But in reality it was more of an inconvenience more than anything, as I never really was in danger unless I was frustrated by the game's difficult combat sections. 

And it's not like restarting from the last major checkpoint is a major penalty: When I ran out of retries in one section, the last checkpoint was only a small bit ago, so it didn't really feel that critical. I wonder if this holds more weight on the "Survivor" difficulty or had more purpose in earlier iterations of the game. Because it's complicated and unnecessary here.

(When my options are run away and die, or fight them all and die, this really makes combat obnoxious to do.)

The worst part about giving the game choice is how the only choice is evade or to attack. There’s no items the player can use to distract or incapacitate enemies like there would be in a conventional stealth game. While weapons like the bow can be helpful to take out foes from a distance, it's not enough.

There isn’t even a way to make the enemies easily surrender unless they’re the only guy left and you’re aiming at them with the pistol. This basically means every combat encounter will play out the same way almost every time: Take out everyone slowly or constantly die until you figure out the trick. You think from the people who brought us games like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell would’ve taken a few pages from that game just to give the player more options to approach a conflict that didn't play out the same way each time.

(At least Our Hero isn't alone...)

You may have noticed this article has been more about the game mechanics than the story. Well, there isn't a whole lot to mention: Our Hero meets up with Mei, a little girl who’s mother got captured. Eventually the two meet up with a guy named Henry – voiced by Elias “I Never Asked for This” Toufexis – and eventually Our Hero saves Mei’s mom Linda at a hotel where other women are kept hostage, presumably for… rather nefarious deeds. 

Eventually Our Hero gets in touch with other contacts and tries to get everybody out safely while also trying to find his family. The final major area is mostly an action fest where Our Hero tries to fight off about a dozen foes before finally getting to an escape vehicle. And then the game ends.

(Well, it's a passing grade, which is good enough, I guess.)

The campaign for I Am Alive is fairly short. According to the game, my total play time was 4 hours and 11 minutes on normal difficulty, not counting retries. And honestly, even for a digital title that normally went for $15, that seems woefully low. While you could replay it on higher difficulties, there’s little incentive to go back and replay it after beating it once. There's no bonus ending or unlockables you can find, so this is definitely a one-and-done kind of game.

The game originally shipped with a multiplayer mode, but it seems to have been removed from the game in 2018, and I couldn’t easily find any footage of it, so I don’t even know what it would’ve entailed. A co-op mode, perhaps? Can’t be just run of the mill PvP combat, this doesn't seem to be the kind of game that would work with that.

(Such riveting environmental storytelling.)

I went into I Am Alive with little expectations. A few friends of mine had played it before and didn’t really remember anything special from it. After finishing it for myself, this is a game that honestly should’ve just been canned rather than being released the way it was. 

The combat’s not fun, the stamina mechanics are interesting yet also obnoxious, certain elements seemed to feel more gamey than story-driven, and the story didn’t do a whole lot to keep me going. It just feels unfinished, even to the point where the ending leaves open questions that go unanswered.

(The way these are rendered seriously made me think these were untextured assets. I know they're not, but they fooled me at first!)

It was probably a decent little time waster in the tail end of the seventh generation of gaming, a survival game that while has some neat ideas, but doesn't execute on them very well. It doesn't help that another survival action game would come out the following year and basically eat this game’s lunch: The Last of Us.

(Cool sliding skills, brah)

If you do want to play I Am Alive, it’s on Steam, still at the original $15 USD price tag. I bought it on a sale for $3, and that’s probably a better asking price. Even then, I see no need to play I Am Alive these days when better games exist that do this kind of thing better. I don’t know if the Darkworks iteration would’ve been amazing but I bet it would’ve been better than this. 

Speaking of Darkworks, I wonder how good Cold Fear is... Some of my friends spoke highly of that as well, but I hope they're not yanking my chain this time.