Recent reviews by Cheddar Goblin

To cut to the chase, I think this game is a solid 6/10 currently, if you can get it on sale for ~20 bucks, I'd say it's well worth it. I ran into no crashes, softlocks or technical problems through my play through.

Complaining about Game Mechanics:

I really want to like this game, I've always had a soft spot for Alien games and the universe as a whole. I this the game is an amazing premise and have a great framework for a 9/10 game. However, I found it didn't utilise everything that was brought to the table. I beat this game in 25 hours on medium and I feel there was a lot more that could be done with it's systems. It allows you to create teams of marines however, on medium, I rarely found myself straying from a set of 5 that you have from the beginning of the game, there was no reason to, this loops back around to another system that is in the game, recruiting new crewmates from the ruins of Lethe. You (rarely) encounter people to recruit on your missions, and aside from one mission, it's really simple, talk to them and run them back to your transport, and you have them for the rest of the game. They end up being one of three roles: Doctor, Engineer, or Recruit. On medium, Doctors and Engineers would be the most useful, and recruits are by far quite useless. With a large team of medics and engineers, you end up getting more material, with new recruits you have someone to add to your training program which won't level them in time for the end of the game. There is a time limit that gets placed on you in the game but it's quite liberal on medium, I don't know if it is shorter or longer on harder and easier difficulties. After each mission your team you used are usually subjected to some time in the med bay based upon how much damage they took, either through stress or physical damage. Due to the longer timeline you're given you have plenty of time to do daily events and nurse your team back to health to take on the next area. This continues until you do all the secondary objectives and clean out the maps, heading to the final level and approaching the ending.

The Ending:

The ending falls kind of flat for me, and kinda feels like it's going to be leading into a sequel/dlc. You finish the last real level quite abruptly and it feels like there is one more left (which technically there is). You clear a landing pad for your transport to roll in on and you feel prepped to take on the last level and, presumably, big boss. You have your team of marines geared up, levelled to 10 and full of supplies and perks. I you played the game like me these marines have been with you since basically the prologue and they've seen some ♥♥♥♥, you're ready to take them down to the ancient city and fight whatever is down there. Instead this team of marines, with unarguably the most experience and training to fight the xenomorphs is left to guard a fully armed APC and jet that have already been shown to hold their own, leaving 3 NPCs you've never played as before to go down to the final area. I get the final mission is basically an interactive cutscene, I don't think you can die and you have infinite command points so you can just spam grenades at anything that moves. I didn't realize this until I looked it up but it's implied that your team of marines is left to die in the mines while the NPCs escape. The ending is also lacking in answers to major questions that come up in the main story, instead leaving them as cliffhangers that are presumably going to be answered in another game or dlc. Not a crazy problem with the game, it doesn't take anything away from the experience of the game, just a bit of a disappointing ending

Overall, this game is a very slight not recommended, it wouldn't take much to turn it into a recommend, but at the current price and lack of it engaging in mechanics it already has, I can't fully recommend the game. For the 25 hours I played the game it was really engaging and I couldn't wait to get to the next mission, always expecting something more to be introduced, but nothing was ever added after a point and systems just never got utilised to it's full potential.