Aliens By Any Other Name – Nemesis Lockdown (Early Access) Review

If you’re not a board game aficionado, you’ve likely never heard of Nemesis.  It’s a fairly high-end board game that came out in 2018 and has been making the rounds of the hardcore board game geeks for a while.  In Nemesis, you control a party of humans trying to escape a space station full of aliens (chytrids) that looks suspiciously like the aliens from Aliens (that was just a fun sentence).  You can be infected, fight your way out, or plot and connive to survive.  It’s a complex and intricate board game that’s quite fun.  More recently, Nemesis: Lockdown, the sequel to Nemesis was released.  Much like Aliens, you’re still on the run, though this time you’re on Mars, trying vainly to survive against an alien onslaught.  It seems you managed to survive the events of the first game and now it’s time to finish the alien menace off once and for all…or die trying.  Now, Awaken Realms and developer InterStudio have converted the rather expensive Nemesis: Lockdown to a fully multiplayer game on Steam!  This is an ideal way to play Lockdown, especially considering how hard it is to get a group of players together these days.  At only $20, you’re saving a lot and you don’t even have to wear pants!  But remember, Lockdown is currently in early Beta so there’s a lot of work to be done here still.

When you start up Nemesis: Lockdown, you’ll find that your options are to play multiplayer or solo.  Since this is a cooperative/competitive game, it’s highly recommended that one play multiplayer, but for the purposes of this review, solo mode was used.  My gaming group has physical copies of both Nemesis and Nemesis: Lockdown and we’ve spent some time playing it and this is really more about the conversion to digital.  The game has no preamble currently and the tutorial mode just gives you a video talking about the game.  Things are currently at the pick-up-and-play stage and for newbies to Nemesis or Lockdown, this is a pretty steep learning curve.  Lockdown is a complex game requiring knowledge of a lot of detailed rules and honestly, if you’ve already played it, you’re mostly good and if you haven’t, you’ll definitely need to read some FAQs or the manual online.  While the gameplay tab is still blank, there are a number of hotkeys you can map in the menu system, so be sure to check them!  You’ll need ‘em!

Aside from that, you just start out in a room and have to kind of know what to do.  Moving from room to room costs cards and once you run out, the turn is over and it’s time for the aliens to make their moves.  As you risk attracting their attention, you explore rooms in the base.  What you’ll likely notice first is that the game doesn’t let you do anything that your cards don’t allow for.  Additionally, moving your cursor to any side of the screen whips the map around quickly, making it difficult to see where you’re at.  The view is fully scalable and rotatable though and everything looks amazing.

Once you get moving, things pick up pretty quickly.  The voiceovers are suitably gritty, the digital dice are neat-looking, and the visuals are good across the board.  There’s honestly no sense in really going into detail on the gameplay itself since it’s identical to the physical board game, but the microphone options built into Lockdown are excellent and easy to use.  It might take a bit of time to get used to all the controls though.

One of the biggest changes from the board game however is the fact that you can’t see the whole board.  Each room you enter is a three dimensional space that you can look at and interact with various items inside.  To see the whole of the map, you have to hit a hot key to bring it up and the feel for this is very different.  Sure, there’s a scrolling list of what’s going on in other rooms but it’s just not the same as watching your friends get attacked and slaughtered by aliens and knowing that just around the corner it’s your time to go if you fail a roll or end up making the wrong choice or noise.  There’s a bit more tension from the music and ambience than there is from the actual game itself and after playing the physical game, it almost feels like you’re losing a bit of the experience.

That’s not to say the game itself is bad though!   Several key changes have been made to gameplay including the lack of destination mechanics since you’re already on Mars and engines since you’re on a base, but there are elevators now and you can also do a lot more with computers, which makes a heck of a lot of sense for a futuristic computerized base!  There are new characters too, though you only get to pick from a couple of randomized ones on solo mode.   Light adds a new mechanic to the game as well, complementing the noise mechanic from the original game, and the ways to escape are a bit cooler as well.  That’s honestly only brushing the surface of the changes and the underlying complexity of the game though.

What you’ll really find though is that Nemesis: Lockdown is a painfully unforgiving game.  One mistake or bad roll can throw an entire game and that kind of sucks.  It’s a bit less so with multiple players but even then, things can go pear-shaped awfully fast and then you’re all just dead.  While that can definitely be a bit entertaining, it’s not exactly the optimum outcome though so just keep in mind that your survival is very much not guaranteed!

While the controls of Lockdown are finicky and it’ll take a while to learn to play on the PC, the game itself is ridiculously faithful to the actual board game.  You’re getting the board game, only on a screen here and that’s a good thing, even if you can rotate the camera outside the viewing range and mess up your entire screen.  While there are some bugs to work out and some implementation issues of specific rules and mechanics, two major updates have rolled out already for Nemesis: Lockdown with more to come, adding things like a tutorial and other key elements.  Suffice it to say, a playable version for newbies is the end goal and one is coming!

If you love board games, love Aliens, and like the idea of a cooperative game where you can also screw your friends to be the last one standing, Nemesis: Lockdown is an excellent game.  This is a rather early Early Access game and there’s a lot to tighten up here but from the looks of things, the finished product will be a spectacularly fun experience for board gamers in the digital realm!  And for those of you that already know and love Nemesis: Lockdown, the Steam version is definitely worth your time!

This review was based on a digital copy of Nemesis: Lockdown provided by the publisher.  It was played on a gaming PC using an I7-8700K with 16 GB of DDR4-3000 RAM,  and an Asus GeForce GTX 1080 ROG Strix graphics card.  Nemesis: Lockdown is exclusive to Steam at this time.