I just watched a full 1080p walkthrough of the campaign, and have not yet played the game myself. These are my thoughts on what can be seen and what has made itself apparent, having played or not.
At one point in the campaign, a Marine can be seen through glass in an incredibly small boxed room that serves seemingly no purpose. He's screaming things as he shoots into a dark vent over and over where aliens are presumably trying to advance on him from. You're supposed to cut the door to get him out, but it's clear that you can keep watching him through the glass do this forever on a loop. All of the elements are there to make it a summation of the campaign. Confining, repetitive, and obnoxious.
This is the
Duke Nukem Forever Gearbox and not the
Borderlands Gearbox, to be certain. The game design is outdated, the gameplay is a headache of repetition as you gun down a plethora of Aliens and (what seems to be even more) Weyland Yutani mercenaries, press buttons, and move on to the next 'wink wink' setpiece. And man are they utterly unspectacular. While the aesthetic is better than most games, and follows closely to that of
Aliens, the actual spaces are dull playgrounds, like a gravel 'sandbox'. It comes down to uninspired, linear fan service that is magically cramped close together.
The plot is next to non-existent. Luckily, there are some bearable characters (aside from Cruz'
unbearable macho-man voice and godawful lines) with likeable personalities and well done voice-acting work. The writing isn't anything special, but most of anything amusing comes from the in-game banter. As for the story, the claim that it will make you feel that
Alien³ is better because of it is utterly self-indulgent and not true in the slightest bit...
Spoiler
All it does is salvage Hicks and give a reason for the Sulacco going into high-alert and ejecting the EEV, never once mentioning the egg on-board or how Ripley was impregnated. The worst part is Hicks never explaining but supposedly knowing why there was a body in his place. When asked whose body it is, he simply responds "that's a longer story". Are you-- are you f**king kidding me? The one thing left from validating his presence in the game aside from being fan-wank and that's what we get? "That's a longer story"? f**k off. That is truly terrible writing.
Atmosphere is something I thought the game would actually have going for it, but after the first 10 or so minutes of actual gameplay and once the hordes of brainless xenos come in, with the Call of Duty-Experience™ Weyland-Yutani mercs very soon after, it goes straight out the window. Everything around the player, from the environments to the aliens themselves just become novelty items and the authenticity that the game was so heavily hyped upon (thank you, Gearbox PR department) is nothing more than a nudge and a wink. Any AvP game did it better... and those had Predators for god's sake.
I'll try not to dwell on the graphics for too long, but technically in general, the game is less-than remarkable. The character models and ani... er, animations (if that's what they can truly be called) are last-gen, and that is no hyperbole. It shows how long the game has been in development for in the worst way, and without the excuse of a studio switch like
Duke Nukem Forever had. If a facial expression ever changed, it was a slight furrow of the brow and nothing more. On top of that, the eyes barely blinked, the mouths seldom moved, and everybody looked as though they were lacking an entire texture layer. From a distance, some of the lighting looks pretty and helps with the mood of some of the lower-maintenance scenes, but it's just a distraction from what it looks like when you move slightly closer. The sound design is the best part of the presentation with everything hitting the right beats, the score most of all, but after a while, like the rest of the game, it all drones on and recycles itself to headache inducing levels.
The AI are below sub-par (save from the sometimes cunning and oddly competent Lurker), particularly friendlies, doing next to nothing at all aside from shooting what is directly in their line of sight. They're useless, and the enemies aren't much better. The Wey-Yu mercs will pull the standard duck and cover or stand out in the open and shout 'come, sweet death' as your gunfire reigns down upon them. At least your teammates blocking doorways isn't an issue, seeing as you can clip right through them at any time as if you were f**king Casper the Friendly Ghost. Really, at no point in development, did nobody look at the fact that you could walk straight through your allies and think "this is kind of awful"? Who am I kidding, they've got the a million other un-assessed basic problems on their hands already. These are basic contemporary game design expectations, so please, apologists, think before you forgive this kind of miserable offering.
I figure I'll wrap it up pretty quickly here, seeing as this is slipping into TL;DR territory, if I haven't reached that point already. I may get some flack for writing this before playing the game myself, but after watching it the whole way through for 6+ hours, what more can be said for the game's campaign? I'm still holding out hope that much more attention has been put into the multiplayer and playing it with friends will hold up nicely (as it did with AvP 2010... though even that, for all of its backtracking, had a better Marine campaign than this). This has been a troubling 6-year stretch blunder of a game, and it seems to just ride the backs of a slew of other games that have come out in that time... most notably Call of Duty and Battlefield series. With nothing but Alien and repeat mercs, that formula can't fly in the Alien universe, and this is exhibit-A of why not.
As somebody who has gone along for the full arc of this game's hype, even at times playing the optimist, I can honestly and objectively say that this is certainly not the sequel to
Aliens we 'always wanted'.