Went into this with zero expectations given how long it's been in the works, that's almost always sign of trouble behind the scenes.
It's surprisingly decent in some ways and then really bad in the ways that should have been easy to do great.
The positives are that the guns feel alright, from the flamethrowers right down to the handguns, if you can aim they can kill pretty good. Bonus points for actually having shotguns that can kill beyond two metres.
The weapon customisation and levelling up had me a bit concerned at first that this would be some destiny type deal where your guns become useless on higher difficulties if you haven't invested in them.
To test that I started the game on intense right away and had not much trouble with two randoms, apart from a few deaths on mission two, but that was because of that monica alien being a complete bullet sponge. Got past her using a double health challenge card and finished the rest without much trouble, so yeah the combat rating thing really doesn't matter.
The aliens themselves are decent on your first time through, but the flaw shows up on your second time in any level. Their travel paths are so scripted that once you know them you can be prefiring into their spawns before they even pop out, not to mention the big fights are way too scripted as well with certain types of aliens always going to spawn in certain areas and at specific times. I don't think challenge cards can change this enough. Although one interesting thing is that if you run through a level enough times some new mini objectives can appear or be moved to a different area which can have unique encounters of their own.
The synths are pretty standard firearm enemies so there's not much to say about them.
The "pathogen" enemies are pretty underwhelming given the scope it has to make pretty much whatever you want? So they made flood infection forms, zombies and a camo enemy with huge telegraphing of its attacks, the drone does its concept better already.
The classes are okay from what I seen, I mainly played as a technician so they seemed the strongest to me especially once you get a flamethrower turret. The gunner and assault are alright too, if you know how to aim and not blast your teammates in the back of the head.
The doc seems kinda pointless though, their trauma kit takes medkits to charge and then leaves you waiting around while enemies keep spawning.
The recon is a lot more useful, you can be almost a one man army with their supply bot giving you infinite ammo, only downside is the mapper bots destroying frames when you activate them.
Now the odd part is this game does player customisation worse than colonial marines somehow, you can only pick an outfit a piece of headgear and that's it, no choosing armour plates, colour of your armour, accessories, types of shirt, putting decals on YOUR armour, none of that.
How do you mess that up in a game which seems to want you to care about how you look?
Even the weapon customisation is nothing amazing, it's about on par with colonial marines.
Also the horde mode in this is pretty meh, there's only one map and it's devoid of interactivity. You may as well just sit where you spawn in because that's where the ammo box is and the locker where you can buy consumables. After ten waves you get some rewards and can keep going or leave, to me it was boring as hell. Again colonial marines had a more interesting horde mode since you had a reason to travel around the maps in that, also it had maps, plural.
The story is whatever, just there as an excuse for the game and none of the voice acting is very good and trying too hard to be quippy. It was exemplified to me when during a shootout my guy unenthusiastically said "maybe we got 'em demoralised" completely deadpan and I was just thinking wtf, Hudson said it sarcastically because that was his character, just repeating what he said in a completely different situation is not funny or cool, pretty bad writer(s) on this game unfortunately.
Also one bullshit point is that the colonial marine ship you're in can't just shoot the refinery the alien hive is in because it's "too big", rolled my eyes right there surely they could have come up with a better reason why you must go back onto it and you could still blow it up along the way.
The music honestly left no impression on me, can't remember even a bit.
Going forward they obviously want to introduce WY as a faction and also Hyperdyne, but does anyone want that? Two more factions of shooting enemies in an aliens game, how exciting. It would be more interesting if they do some more with the pathogen, there was some mention of other animals it could affect I think, that they haven't seen it work with yet.
Also with the queen on the refinery dead seems like it's time for the ones on the planet to make a queen of their own.
Overall, it's just an okay game but really doesn't excel at what it should given how limited in scope it is.
