SOMA – Alien: Isolation underwater with robots!

• Developer: Frictional Games
• Game: SOMA
• Price: £22.99 (on Steam at time of review)

INTRODUCTION:

Have you ever wondered what would happen if they mixed up Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Alien: Isolation and BioShock?  Me either, but here it is anyway!  SOMA is a game by Frictional Games, the guys who made the good Amnesia game, and I’ll happily say right from the off, they knocked it out of the park for me with this game.  You start the game as an ordinary guy who has some kind of brain damage from a car accident, and you are due to go for some kind of scan on your brain to have a look at what the damage is.  From there you are somehow shot forward in time 100 years to a strange future where it seems humanity is at it’s end.  To make matters worse, robots seem to have inherited the earth! Who knew eh?

Playing this the whole way through I have seen no bugs or glitches at all, so I was either extremely lucky with my playthrough or Frictional Games really busted their asses to make this game extremely easy to immerse yourself into.  This game has great plot twists and the ending is certainly something I was happy with, and it has a weird two part ending which I won’t speak about due to spoilers, but it’s definitely worth playing for the story alone.

I had this game on the highest settings and my PC handled it easily, I’m still running my GTX 970, and saw no problems whatsoever.  On lower end rigs this game should run just fine on low to normal settings, on high settings though you could end up running into problems, the fact that the graphics in this are great probably is another reason why this game is so terrifying.  The robots you go up against are designed so well, and are intelligent to the point where they’ll open doors to go after you which makes this game so much more terrifying than Amnesia: The Dark Descent ever was… to me anyway.