izigame.me

Personally, I love this game, but I am an enormous fan of the Aliens IP. Unfortunately, like most other games set in the Aliens universe, this title fails to deliver an experience that could stand on its own without the heavy lifting the brand does to elevate it. There are a lot of good ideas here, but ultimately the game feels like it was conceived as a live-service model co-op horde survival game similar to the likes of Fatshark's Vermintide 2, but whoever was backing it got cold feet and decided they didn't have enough faith in the product to allocate the kind of time and money needed to maintain a game like that.
The moment I started this game, the first thing I noticed is the kind of awkward, boxy movement that's very common in a lot of low-budget or indie games. Maybe not everyone will notice this, but for those of us who know exactly what I'm talking about, once you've made this observation it's usually pretty easy to tell what kind of game you're about to be playing. Animations are passable but nothing special, shooting is decent and satisfying, but dear God the movement and camera are just downright awful. Whoever decided that a game set mostly in claustrophobic space station corridors should use an over-the-shoulder player camera needs to go back to game design basics. Not only is it already inconvenient to constantly have the camera zooming in and out on the back of your head as you turn around in these spaces, but where a lot of third person shooters would hide the character model if it would obstruct the player's view, this game does not. There's a dodge system with an associated stamina bar that seems to have invincibility frames, but it's incredibly unreliable. Sometimes it feels like there's no way you should have dodged an attack and the enemy will fly past you, and other times you'll be mid-dodge and just snap into the enemy's grip and have to suffer through the QTE (yes, QTE) "break hold" mechanic that seems to only exist to make you feel like you have something to do while you're unable to do anything else but wait for your AI allies or other players to shoot the enemy off of you. There's an awful lot of moments in this game where an enemy attack seems to just be predeterminately successful, and if you take the steps to avoid it, the game is just like "nah" and the enemy will teleport straight through a barrier or wall to you because it already made up it's mind that you were going down in that moment.
There are 7 classes in the game: Gunner, Demolisher, Technician, Doc, Phalanx, Lancer, and Recon. Recon is only available after completing all of the base campaign missions, but it's really not clear to me why, since it's not any stronger than any of the other classes in the game, nor would using it have made the campaign missions any easier. All of these classes are fun and distinct enough from one another to warrant each's existence, and leveling up and crafting a build for each is easily the game's biggest strength. Each class has a unique set of abilities (two active and one passive), aside from which there is a sort of "skill tree" that functions sort of like a Tetris puzzle, where there are a set amount of slots with different modifiers that take up a certain number of slots, and it's up to you to customize and fit them together to get the most out of your class. Each class has it's own unique modifiers, but there are universal and shared modifiers, so you can mix and match a lot of different specializations from different classes to really make each your own.
There are plenty of weapons in the game to choose from, and like with classes, they are (for the most part), distinct enough from one another to keep things fresh when you decide you want to switch things up. Like any game, there are obvious standouts, and there are obvious "do not use" options. Unfortunately, the classic Pulse Rifle we all know and love is one of the standard issue weapons, and as such isn't really the best option in a lot of cases, but you can make it work with the right attachments and class build. For whatever reason the developers of this game decided to remove the underbarrel launcher from the Pulse Rifle and put it in as a separate weapon in the handguns category, stating in the description that apparently the underbarrel application was "problematic" in the game-universe without elaborating on how. Fortunately, the Smartgun is pretty much best-in-class for heavy weapons despite being standard issue.
There are 12 campaign missions (15 counting DLC), each of which takes about 15 minutes to complete. The missions are split into chapters, 4 of which being the base game, and the fifth being the DLC. Beyond that, there are 5 holdout style wave-based maps seemingly intended to be the endgame grind content since they are not playable until all campaign missions have been completed. Nearly half of the base game campaign missions have a heavy focus on non-xenomorph enemies, and this is where it becomes painfully obvious how mediocre the core of this game really is. The sixth campaign mission is nearly all cover-based shooting against bullet-spongy humanoid synthetics firing hitscan weapons at the player, and it was almost the point at which I gave up on the game altogether. The entire third chapter of the game focuses on creatures formed from the pathogen contained aboard an Engineer ship. 90% of these missions involve standing in one spot unable to progress while an excessive number of headcrab-like skittering critters that die in 1-2 shots run toward you while you wait for a door to open or something. The rest of the enemies in these levels are just humanoid zombies with a small health pool that run in a straight line at you and test your patience while you wonder why the Aliens game you bought is making you play a bad version of Left 4 Dead for a quarter of its runtime.
AI is just terrible on both ends. Your AI companions while playing solo will constantly shoot you in the ass, causing you to stumble and throw off your aim, go down in the most ridiculous ways, or lag behind causing you to be unable to advance until you run back and remind them of your existence so they resume following you and you can continue the mission. Xenomorphs and other melee-based enemy types sometimes become stuck in corners, leading to moments where nothing is happening because the game wants you to kill all enemies before the objective advances, and you have to run around looking for the last enemy. Synth enemies run around in circles, hop in and out of cover, and throw themselves into explosions like their entire AI routine is simply to perform random actions and hope they kind of resemble sentience. I could say it's at least not as bad as Colonial Marines, but it's been a decade and comparing anything to that dumpster fire is really just pointless since anything looks like a masterpiece held to those standards.
One of the more appealing aspects of this game is the challenge card system, which I'm sure is not at all unique to this game, but works well enough with everything else going on to mix everything up enough to keep the replay value at an adequate level. I have no idea what challenge cards were like when the game launched, but as of writing this, they are available for free from the Armory, so you can just grab as many as you like and apply them at your leisure. Some give you benefits like double ammo, more damage, or weaken powerful enemies and grant no bonus, while others add obstacles such as the inability to fire while moving, disabling radar, or making your guns jam in exchange for a boost to your postgame rewards. While playing solo, you can only apply one challenge card, but with all three slots filled each player can throw their own challenge to the mix which can really do a lot for making things feel different.
No conclusion because of the character limit. Buy at your discretion.