Alien: Blackout Release Date Confirmed, And It's Soon

The recently revealed Alien: Blackout mobile game has been given a release date. The iOS and Android title will launch on the App Store and Google Play on January 24.

The game is seemingly a spin-off of Creative Assembly's 2014 title Alien: Isolation. In Blackout, Amanda Ripley once again faces a fight to survive aboard a Weyland-Yutani space station infested with aliens.

"The terror of Alien is brought to life in Alien: Blackout," reads co-developer D3 Go's website. "Try to stay alive while trapped aboard a crippled Weyland-Yutani space station carrying a deadly Xenomorph as it tirelessly hunts you and the crew.

"Outsmart the perfect hunter by making perilous choices. Players must rely on the damaged controls of the space station or risk sacrificing crew members to avoid deadly contact, permanently altering the outcome of the game."

Players will be tasked with surviving seven levels by guiding Ripley's crew through "increasingly challenging tasks using only the station's emergency system." Contending with a limited power supply, survival will require players to effectively operate a holographic map, surveillance cameras, and motion trackers to stay hidden and out of the Xenomorph's clutches.

In addition, more stories starring Amanda Ripley, the daughter of the original films' protagonist, Ellen Ripley, may be on the way soon. Amanda was the player character in Isolation, which took place 15 years after the events of the original 1979 film. In that game, Amanda went with a Weyland-Yutani team to Sevastopol Station, a distant space station in the process of being decommissioned, after the flight recorder was recovered from Ellen's destroyed ship, the Nostromo. While Amanda eventually got hold of the recorder, she also went through the same ordeal as her mother, when an alien began picking off the people of Sevastopol one by one. Alien: Blackout appears to pick up the story from there, with Amanda trying to fend off another alien in a place called Mendel Station while still pursuing answers about what happened to Ellen.

The tweets from Alien Anthology teasing the new game use the hashtags #AmandaRipley and #ReadPlayWatch, suggesting there's more to do with Amanda's story than just play it. In fact, the latest tweet emphasizes the "watch" part of the hashtag with capitalized letters, unlike other messages from the same account.