After seeing it for the first time, Left Alive already feels like some strange relic of the PS2 age, and I mean that both as a positive and a negative.
Watching a series of clips and speaking to its director, Toshifumi Nabeshima, it’s clear how ambitious this game aims to be. At its core, this is much more of a third-person shooter than I went in expecting. But it’s also aiming to be a mech game, a narrative experience, even survival horror in some small way.
That shooter core is intriguing, if not immediately engaging. At its heart, this is a cover shooter and, right now, it doesn’t look like a hugely slick one; animations click into place unnaturally, and the spaces we were shown were very much of the “brown corridor” variety. On the other hand, the potential’s there for far more interesting interactions than “pull trigger.”
