Aliens: Dark Descent
Fair · Action · 2023
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $39.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 25.4h
- Value
- $1.57/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 80% over the last 30 days against 88% all-time.
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Aliens: Dark Descent is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, 3 GB VRAM, AMD Radeon R9 380 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, 60 GB of storage. Windows only.
Drop into the gripping journey of Aliens: Dark Descent, a squad-based, single-player action game in the iconic Alien franchise. Lead your soldiers in real-time to stop a new and terrifying kind of Xenomorph outbreak on Planet Lethe.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $11.99. 32 discounts in the 3 years on record. They run about 55 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 4 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 93 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Infested Planet ($14.99, scores 71) beats it on value, while it beats Nuclear Dawn ($9.99, scores 50).
Critics scored it 75. Players sit 13 points higher at 88 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 16 percent of players ever finish it. On a 25.4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Players rate it 88 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 80 percent. Something recent has soured the room. Of the 599 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 4 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2025 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 57 percent of the 607 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic); the score docks it lightly for that.
The drop-off
82% start to 16% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
276 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I have never played a game like this. What an immersive experience. I am blown away... and scared
This game teach and train you to be a better person, to remain cool under pressure against overwhelming odds, and remind you to take rest between work
Oh damn... I think one more mission and my marines will frag me before I will get a chance to find them a shrink. Half the squad is gone. The rest are exhausted, traumatized, missing limbs, with cybornetic prosthetics, on heavy meds, singing "You are my lucky Star" I should probably start over. 10/10
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Aliens: Dark Descent scores 64/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1150440/aliens-dark-descentThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.