Recent reviews by schuyler 󠀡󠀡󠀡⁧⁧_

Games have honestly been getting a little stale for me lately. Been waiting patiently for some games to come out. Then out of nowhere this is in my recommendations. As a long time Alien, AVP and Predator fan when I see Xenomorphs, I click. I click a lot.

I wish so much that this game was what was released as Aliens: Colonial Marines instead of the game we got before. This game perfectly represents the IP. It is like XCOM, but this ain't your Grandmothers squad-based top down Marine. ♥♥♥♥ is real time. Combat is stressful. It can get chaotic. The longer you take, the harder it gets. And oh boy, does it get hard. You thought iran was tough? Well iwalked through a blast door only to be greeted by a praetorian and a handful of warriors, ready to drag my marines into the deep dark hive to make more of them bastards. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, nothing beats a day in the Corps Marines!

Game play is solid. Solid my friend. It feels good to move the Squad around. It takes a little bit of time getting used to moving your whole squad as a single entity. If you are used to games like XCOM where you have fine control of each individual character, that is not present here. You give orders to the Squad as a single entity. And your Squad Leader/Squaddies perform the orders and tasks given to them. Save for the occasional hiccup where a marine gets a little lost by a crate you ordered to be looted or you sprint away from a marine only to wonder why he is being dragged away to his doom, it feels pretty good. It also makes sense they are one entity. These are Xenomorphs Marines! They excel at picking off lone marines. So stick together, red means dead and lets get the ♥♥♥♥ out of this ♥♥♥♥ hole in one piece.

The game environments are great. I was happily surprised by the level of detail on the interiors of the facility. But the first time the weather kicked up, I ended up taking a second to watch the wind whip around my marines. Game looks good for the kind of game it is. Lot of Industrial aesthetic and 1970's Space Concept art vibes. Xeno spaces feel squishy and lived in. All-in-all, pretty nice.

As far as bugs go, I will say that day one I only have found 4 bugs. First bug that is sort of a big one is that when editing marines at your home-base, you can get stuck in the weapon selection menu which will require you to quit out of the game entirely. Sometimes the Back button fails to appear there. Second bug is the occasional pathing hiccup by the marines. It is a bit silly when it happens and they get stuck, but a lone marine is a dead marine on basically all difficulty settings. The pathing by the marines is great other then that. Also I noticed the Xeno's sometimes will stay in one spot for very long periods of time. I would assume it is intended behavior, however they usually are doing other things when they are "sitting still", not upright looking around in a single spot for twenty minutes. The Third bug I have ran into is just sometimes when something dies they stay in the last position they died in. It is a bit confusing when I kill 30 Xeno's only to think 1 is still alive but in reality its corpse is just standing upright stuck in an attack pose. The Fourth bug, and probably funniest is that sometimes when I pick someone up they end up floating around weird places before finally ending up on my marines shoulders. Might be tied to the pathing hiccups. It is funny when it happens and I have only had it happen twice.
Overall, the menu bug needs to definitely be a priority. Other then that, the other bugs don't really affect gameplay. The pathing one for your marines is circumvented by you just paying attention to your marines. And the Xeno's standing in place at locations just makes the game more difficult. Which is perfectly fine by me. :p

The audio in this game is pretty nice. I do think that maybe the audio mixing could of been a little better. The sfx are faithful to the universe/movies but I do think that maybe they could of just been a little bit closer to the movie. The Xeno sound effects are fine but personally a little more variety would of been nice. The marines talk a lot and have voice lines. For what its worth, its still better then Colonial Marines. My only gripe is that sometimes they just say a bunch of movie quotes, which is cool, but also the Voice Actors themselves even seem to sound a little bit annoyed or maybe tired when they say the Movie Quotes. It is sort of funny, but also gets really old fast how many times they say those same lines that are engraved into our minds already over and over again.

Before I get into True Negatives, I have to say that this game is great. I highly recommend it and you should buy it now since it came out cheaper then a "full price" AAA game. The negative things are more just gripes with all Alien games I have.

Now, my biggest gripes are the lack in Xeno types you encounter and the semi-lack in content. They went as far as calling the Egg and Chest burster as enemy types. They have "Category 2" Xenomorphs but that only includes the Crusher and Praetorian. What about literally all billion of the other Xeno types that would of fit really well into this? Chestbursters get killed in cutscenes basically. Why not have a room full of people up on walls that burst a small swarm of chestbursters you have to deal with or they will tick up the aggressiveness of the hive? Why not bring back enemies like the Carrier that can put a Facehugger on in with a special attack? Where are my Spitters, Boilers, Royal facehuggers, Prowlers, Kings, Flyers, Reds, Alphas... the list goes on. They could of had so many more Special types of enemies. With the long list of Xenomorph types in both new and old canon, it is always disappointing to see a small lackluster amount of the types shown.
And overall amount of content is ok. But I feel like there could of been more customization for the Marines. More customization maybe for weapons, like being able to upgrade a specific weapon for a marine or give it attachments to buff said weapon. The amount of classes is ok and they each have their role, but i feel like this system would of done way better if it had more options for perks for each class. That way it was more of a choice of how you are going to build a Marine's class specifically vice just leveling them and getting the only 3 perks available for each class. I also think the amount of traits marines get/have is underwhelming. And overall I just wish they did more with the system.

Hopefully with time and DLC's, they add more content overall. Hopefully they don't just do a flyby drop off of this game only to immediately abandon it like a few other Alien franchise games released...

But as I said before, overall great game. It feels fun/good to play. It has great atmosphere and environments. It has some decent audio. And I would highly recommend it to all the Weyland-Yutani Corpo's out there and trigger happy space marines.

Kind of reminded me of FTL with how the ship systems work. It's a pretty interesting game and worth the 26 hours I've already sunk in as of writing this message. You travel around space in your ships you build/customize and try to survive with your crew. Along the way you'll run into other factions, including Space Pirates which are always fun, and things like derelict ships. Game is definitely worth it if you enjoy Logistics games and Resource management in space. Can't wait to see what else they add to this game during its development!