Played through the campaign last night and mostly really enjoyed it!
I only got a change to play it once, but these are some of my initial thoughts (I'll go ahead and put stuff in spoiler drop-downs, just incase):
Levels:
Spoiler
One of my favorite aspects is the level designs of each mission. While it's obviously a reuse of a lot of assets and design elements we've seen before in other missions, they do a good job mixing things up with the layouts, and making the levels have a different feeling atmosphere imo. Especially in missions 2 and 3.
Mission 2 is like a darker and moodier version of Giants in the Earth. Some cool and different engineer structures, with rain and lightning in the background. Seeing the engineer husks from the pathogen is a nice touch from the films, and also adds to the darker atmosphere.
The descent from the dark engineer structures into the pathogen hives is pretty cool. I like the visual mixup of the pathogen hive. Lots of brown and yellow hues to mix things up. The white neomorphs contrast and compliment the level well, from a visual standpoint.
My only real gripe with the levels is it feels like they redo the thing of having a point in the level where you have to go to multiple room/points nearby to find an object that's needed to progress. Kinda felt like a way to avoid adding more to the level. But didn't bother me too much tbh.
Enemies:
Spoiler
I'm a fan of the neomorphs, so I was definitely glad to see them. Even cooler to see them clashing with xenomorphs at certain points. The neos are definitely just reskins of the xenos, as far as general behavior goes. No surprise there, and not really a knock since that's what I think everyone was expecting. The special neos are pretty ok additions to the lineup, design-wise. The neo equivalent of spitters seem more deadly, which mixes things up well. Would have loved for them to replaced the xeno drone with a neo that matches the sleeker design of the adult neomorph from Covenant! That would have made me really happy to see.
Of course the BIG addition in the campaign is the legitimate boss fight with the pathogen queen at the end. And man, this was so awesome and worth the money imo! It's great to see that the developers saw that this was something people wanted and made sure to add it in. Thankfully, the boss fight is a lot of fun too! Once I saw that queen drop down and that big health bar show up, I had a big smile on my face haha. I like the element of chipping away her armor to do better damage. Makes it more interesting than just shooting it til it's dead. There's even a small cutscene after you defeat her, which was a nice touch. This boss fight made me very happy, and absolutely made the new campaign worth it for me!
My only criticism with it is that it would have maybe been good to have an escape sequence like at the end of "Only Way to be Sure". Feels kinda awkward to just have it end there, while we're still surrounded by enemies in the middle of a hive lol. But I can understand them not wanting to be too repetitive.
Overall I'm pretty satisfied with this expansion and can't wait to play some more!
This just makes me more hopeful that we continue to get more big DLC like this!
While the game has it's bare-bones problems, content-wise, it seems clear to me that the developers are actually passionate about the franchise, and are trying to add on content that will satisfy both casual and hardcore players.
