Just completed marathoning the game in 18 hours, clearing it from chapter 5 to the end.
Spoiler
The pacing was awesome for me from that chapter, with the Alien keeping you on your toes, and that breath of air once its done. The rubber Joes were fun to encounter too, with me trying to zap it only to find out they are invulnerable to shocks and I went back to hiding from them. Then came the Hive... And the end was kinda an adrenaline trip with the music and multiple aliens hunting your ass. It reminded me of the end of Aliens, with you flaming your way clear and running to escape.
The tension from the first part of the game to trap and space the alien really reminded me of Alien 3, up to the end where you act as the lure to go into the detachable module, and you get asked if its still following you.
The tension was very well played throughout the game, and I felt that it was just perfect, like the old games (System Shock 2), where though the games are long you do feel the immersion of the world. And the logs lets you feel that events are happening around you as you go through the game outside of your perception, and that you are not really isolated...
The Sinclair logs showed how the other group of survivors beside the Marshals faired, and how they managed to survived longer, until they were swarmed by the multiple aliens escaping from the destroyed hive, with their children taken to serve as new hosts. They also seemed to be the only group that were taking care of the surviving children...until the end. You never speak or encounter the main group until you find their remains, but it still sits with you that they couldn't be saved. Finding the ruined sanctuary really gave that Hadley's Hope feel from Aliens.
At the end, everyone on Sevastopol station dies except for Ripley, and that really ties in with the idea of the first film that the Alien is one deadly species like Marlow says.
I find it really funny how there's so many Aliens floating around in space by the end though, seeing as how all of them that didn't get roasted ended up being spaced.
I did feel that the ending part was a bit lacking, since it felt like the missing cutscenes where you enter and leave the docks in the ambulance shutter and when you enter the airlock and then get blown out into space at the end cuts part of the immersion of the game. It made the transition rather uneven, since you just seem to teleport into locations.
I really do think this is the best Alien game I've play so far, and while A:CM set a really low bar for the series, this game set a really high hurdle that future games will have to meet. I'm going to enjoy replaying A:I again every year just to remember the atmosphere, during Halloween.
edit:
Just to list some plot points I found really odd/stupid however...
The ending, firstly there's only Ripley, who is EVA trained, so why can't she just jump/float over or use a winch or something like they attempted to in the first place, instead of attaching a really stable docking arm meant to pull the whole station onto the ship? Were they trying to prevent the station from falling? For what reason?
Then there's the whole get caught by an alien so she spent maybe 15 to 30 mins unconscious, while cocooned in a nest? While the who station and the ship is falling into the gas giant? Firstly, if my ship lost contact with the single person I was attempting to save, and I'me about to get dragged into death because of a really stupid idea to get connected to the station, and I have crew who are EVA trained, I would send them to disconnect the damn thing so I can get the hell away.
Secondly, how did the aliens manage to grow so many eggs outside of the hive in so short a time? It's like at most half an hour to an hour between the time Ripley blew the hive till she contacted the Torrens, and in that segment there's like eggs and hiving all over parts of the level, so that's a really glaring plot point.
And lastly, the party crashers, the Company men, they came in on a ship didn't they? And the Torrens didn't spot or make contact with them or vice versa? Did they just appeared out of no where? I was half expecting the Torrens to get blown up, and Ripley ending up having to hijack the ship.
Since most of the previous parts of the game were pretty well written, I can only imagine that the ending was changed from what Dan wrote to include certain elements that the developers wanted to include as an alien game. While I appreciate having those scenes to play through, they really don't fit in the plot that well and seemed pretty rushed.
