I finally opened my copy and got to play it the other day after having to wait for a couple weeks. After just one playthrough I would give it a pretty good rating. It is a tile placing game that has some dice rolling and definitely a lot of strategy as far as your decision making. You can choose where you want to go and whether you want to discover new tiles, shoot xenos or try to complete objectives. It is fairly simple as far as rules and combat as you just roll the dice to see what happens. The turn system is interesting as you have a deck with cards for each player and the hive and just flip them over to see whose turn it is. Thus you can have one player go several times in a row or not go for awhile depending on the draw. It can hurt you pretty bad if the xenos go several times in a row.
Each player actually controls a squad of three members and they all move as one on the board. The three characters just give you more abilities and power when doing actions. You get to have one named character from the movie and then two generic grunts. The named character has a special ability and the grunts just provide firepower and defense. I think it works well as it gives you some options for each turn. The overall objective is to find all of your mission tokens and then get back to the APC to escape. But obviously the xenos and barricades are slowing you down during your exploration. But any mission tokens you find can go towards giving you some special abilities that will help you.
Overall I would definitely recommend it for anyone who likes Aliens and/or light to medium strategy games. There is a little bit of luck based on dice rolls and turn phase draws, but you definitely feel like most of the outcome is up to your decision making and strategy. I also liked it because it is a little bit different from most of the games I have so far. They are mostly card/deck building games and this gives some board/tile exploration gameplay where you can move little figures around an environment. I like that it gives some of that aspect without going as far as the tabletop minis game that are more complex, longer and heavy on strategy/decisions. It gives the perfect amount of the style for me without going too far. And there are plenty of references to Aliens from the characters, quotes and scenery on the tiles, so there is definitely a lot of flavor