Review: Directive 8020 (PS5) – Dull Sci-Fi Thriller Is a Supermassive Letdown

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I was really interested in checking out Directive 8020 because it combines the intense formula of Supermassive Games with the chilling vibes of the movies Alien and The Thing.

I really love both of those movies, and the thought of having to figure out if a teammate is secretly a dangerous alien—and then dealing with the fallout if I guess wrong—felt like an amazing story concept.

While Directive 8020 was somewhat enjoyable, it didn’t live up to its full promise and ultimately left me feeling disappointed.

Okay, so I’m playing this game where I’m part of the crew on the Cassiopeia, a scout ship heading to Tau Ceti f – basically, a possible new planet for us humans. But things go south fast! We get hit by a meteorite, and now there’s this… thing spreading around the ship. It can copy people perfectly, so you don’t know who you can trust anymore. It’s super creepy and the goal is to figure out what’s going on before it takes over the whole ship.

It had been a while – since Until Dawn in 2014 – since I’d played a game by Supermassive, and I was immediately impressed by how many choices the game presents. Even after just 20 minutes, you start to see how your decisions impact the story, with the game helpfully displaying those consequences on-screen.

You’ll experience the story through the eyes of around seven characters, and your choices – from dialogue to how you handle situations – will determine who lives and who doesn’t.

Throughout the game, you’ll directly control the characters to explore areas, participate in brief action sequences, and attempt some simple stealth sections – though the stealth quickly becomes repetitive.

The game’s basic structure is still similar to Until Dawn, but it’s added some layers of complexity. Now, characters have specific destinies that you can unlock through your decisions, or potentially miss altogether.

These predetermined paths shape characters, influencing whether they become heroes or confident individuals, and opening up new ways to develop their abilities and the story itself. However, the characters themselves are just okay. I didn’t actively dislike any of them, but I also never felt particularly invested in their journeys.

I appreciated learning about the characters through dialogue and finding hidden story details – it felt like discovering who they were alongside the game. However, this approach also made everyone feel a bit undefined, which was disappointing considering the strong cast, including Lashana Lynch from No Time To Die.

However, the game’s most significant flaw is its setting. While it draws inspiration from Alien, the location of Cassiopeia, where the majority of the game unfolds, is simply uninspired and boring.

I wasn’t hoping for a spaceship like the Nostromo, but this one’s futuristic look feels bland and unoriginal. After spending about seven hours wandering through the empty corridors, identical offices, and deserted living spaces, I never felt like I understood how big the ship was or where I even was.

The game definitely looks better when things get really chaotic, but it’s clear Supermassive Games didn’t prioritize creating a compelling spaceship. That’s disappointing, because in sci-fi horror, a memorable setting like the ships in games such as Dead Space, SOMA, or Alien Isolation is often crucial to the experience.

It starts a little slow, but the story really gets going in the second half. I enjoyed some unexpected twists, and the creature designs were particularly well done. Plus, your decisions actually seem to matter as the story progresses.

I wish there had been more of them, but the game does have those classic moments from The Thing where you’re left guessing if the person in front of you is human or a dangerous alien. These moments create great tension and are exactly the kind of exciting highlights I hoped to find in this game.

As you’d expect from a Supermassive game, there’s a lot of replay value here. Your choices impact the story and determine who lives or dies, and these outcomes play out through both decisions you make and fast-paced action sequences. A single wrong move in those sequences can quickly lead to a character’s demise.

But if you really want to experiment, they added this cool rewind feature with Directive 8020. It lets you jump back to important decisions and try different choices! There’s still the classic survivor mode where you stick with whatever happens, but this new system is awesome because you can explore more of the story without having to start all over again.

I have mixed feelings about this feature. It’s good to have as an option, and you can easily disregard it, but it feels a little strange. Every time you make an important decision, you’ll get a reminder that you can always go back and change it.

Often, the biggest choices you make don’t have immediate effects. The game lets you make a decision, and you won’t see the results until later – sometimes not even until the next episode. This encourages you to rethink your choices before you fully understand their impact.

Honestly, I’ve found that even if you can rewind to try and get a different result, you still end up having to play through a bunch of the game again. It feels way simpler to just start over from the beginning, if I mess up.

The game features a system where choices create different paths, but I think it actually lessened the impact of those branching storylines. Sometimes it would even explain exactly how a decision changed things, usually just whether a character lived or died.

A part of me is curious to replay things and explore different choices, just to see how much control I really have over the story. But honestly, the thought of going through it all again isn’t very appealing.

I played the game on both the standard PS5 and the PS5 Pro and didn’t encounter any problems on either one. You can choose between two graphics settings: a ‘quality’ mode that runs at 30 frames per second, or a ‘performance’ mode for smoother gameplay at 60fps. If you have a VRR-compatible TV, there’s also a balanced mode that runs at 40fps, which is what I preferred. The game also makes great use of the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback.

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2026-05-11 19:38