Left Alive Reviews

You’ll be left out with a “meh” after finishing the game. What game did we just play?

Left Alive falls short in many areas. What could of been an interesting title ends up being one you best avoid.

In the end, Left Alive remains a muddled mess of things that could have been. It feels as though it was rushed in every conceivable way. While it's certainly playable and even interesting in certain places throughout the game, it utterly fails at being a polished title with a compelling enough campaign to warrant a complete playthrough – unless you're reviewing it, of course. Throughout it all, I was never angry at the game for being little more than a haphazard, slapdash creation, but more disappointed. Front Mission is a fantastic series with a lot to give. We haven't heard from it in quite some time, and a new game set in the same universe could have knocked it out of the park. Instead, we're left with Left Alive, which looks as though it's been all but left for dead as Square Enix seems to be sweeping it under the rug.

Left Alive is a third-person stealth survival shooter game by Square Enix that is set in the Front Mission universe. We have recently played the game on PS4 and the experience was pretty disappointing. Here is our review of the game.

Square Enix’s Left Alive is a stealth-survival game where the stealth gameplay barely seems to work and the survival mechanics hardly ever seem to matter. Often the beginning of a level in this “stealth” game will have a reminder (delivered through cutscene dialogue) that advises the player to avoid open conflict with enemies and instead sneak past them yet there are multiple mandatory combat segments throughout the game.

As it is though, Left Alive is simply not worth your time or money. It has a fairly interesting story to unravel, but only the most patient and persistent of players will be able to enjoy it, even if they pop the difficulty down to its lowest level. It may look okay once its textures have finally loaded in, but Left Alive feels old in most regards. It’s clunky and awkward and mostly ignores the advances that games have made in the last 10 years or so. Imagine what a below-average PS2 stealth game would feel like if you played it today. That’s Left Alive. And the gameplay suffocates anything that’s interesting about the game until the only thing that’s left alive is your desire to turn it off.

I enjoy high-tension military thrillers and stealth games, but Left Alive falls flat in every way that it attempts to stand out. Its story of surviving a technologically advanced invasion has some interesting ideas but is delivered with limp dialogue and voice acting from annoying characters. Worse, every concept introduced to its gameplay – stealth, action, crafting, and Wanzer combat – comes awash with bad ideas and uneven execution that make it feel difficult for all the wrong reasons, including bullet-sponge enemies and wildly inconsistent AI. The crafting is an interesting idea but is clunky to use in a pinch, even when it’s key to progression and survival. All these issues crushed the fun a little bit more every time they got me killed. Left Alive is probably best left unplayed.

Left Alive is an ambitious new development from Square Enix. Unfortunately, that ambition is squandered. The gameplay is dreadful, the enemy AI is broken, and the visuals are bland as all hell. Those issues are complemented by a boring story and a slew of audio and gameplay bugs that simply make Left Alive a failure on all fronts.

Left Alive isn’t terribly ugly or particularly nice-looking, outside of its mech designs. I’m a sucker for mechs and robot suits, so I found the hulking mechs to be a highlight of the game, as they look great and are fun to use on the rare occasion where you get to pilot one. The game also occasionally assaults you with walls of tutorial text that are way too much to take in at once, especially when it interrupts or impedes gameplay.

Even with its exhaustive, laundry list of issues, it's telling when a broken game of this magnitude still manages to rustle up some semblance of potential. But that's perhaps why the end result of Left Alive is as depressing as it is and why the disappointment in its execution is matched (colossally so) only by the frustration in its perceived notion of competency. Left Alive is as close to as abysmal a delivery as you can get without denoting it as some utter failure through-and-through, primarily due to the most minuscule of good intentions and half-baked ideas that litter its mostly generic and uninspired game world. But with so many narrative, technical and gameplay issues that pop up at almost every turn -- all wound up within some of the worst third-person stealth mechanics imaginable -- Left Alive is both a horridly-conceived experience and a fundamentally unenjoyable product to even attempt to immerse one's self in.

Square Enix has had a strange time lately, often finding itself under scrutiny due to its development troubles over on the Japanese side, and some equally weird stuff happening with its western properties. That said, it’s easy to forget Square Enix has a long history of experimentation, although its smaller fare used to quietly slide in-between more frequent, AAA-level content. Now, Left Alive, a strange, stealth/survival action game set in the Front Mission universe, is dropping at a time when Square Enix doesn’t really have anything else going on, landing directly under the spotlight. While it’s obviously a lower-budget game from the moment you boot it up, this title has a lot of things going for it under the surface. It’s a brass tacks, trial and error stealth game that isn’t afraid to punish you severely for messing up, and doesn’t bother with much of the annoying, fluffy babysitting so many other survival games do. Despite all the jank, Left Alive is a fascinating experience you won’t find anywhere else.

I don't have much else to say about Left Alive. If you're feeling up to buying it -- why? I'd stay as far away from Left Alive as possible. For all of you hardcore Front Mission fans hoping for a proper sequel in the series, you can bury those hopes and dreams. With a team consisting of so much talent behind it, I truly wonder what went wrong with Left Alive. I love Square Enix games to death typically but this is frankly unacceptable...and it's $60.

Left Alive is a shoddily assembled mess with no real redeeming features. Its broken AI and glaring technical issues only serve to highlight the poor game design on display.