I usually see the good in most games and am really forgiving of a lot of issues but this game is so bad it compelled me to write a review. It's a long one so bare with me, but there's a lot wrong with this game. That's also coming from someone who adored the first game!
This is entirely worse and for double the price.
- Terrible performance with constant frame drops, I would regularly go down from 120 to like 14 and then back again. At first I thought it was maybe some shader compilation still happening and it would go away after the first time that shader appears, but nope! Even 5 hours in I was still dropping frames every 20 seconds, it became nauseating to play.
- The dialogue is SO cringe and the facial animations are some of the worst that I've seen. Our group turned down the character audio completely, it's that bad. The game forces you to interact with these characters to progress the story in the hub and I couldn't skip it fast enough.
- Music varies from actually pretty good, to what the actual f### am I listening to. The guns sound good at least, but listening to a smart gun fire constantly for 40 minutes at a time gets pretty tiresome.
- Combat is sorta fun, but the time to kill feels terrible even on normal difficulty, let alone anything higher. Every encounter plays out basically the same. Think of a Hunter jumping on you from L4D and that happens every 10 seconds. Spitters stay back and hit you from range but they take so long to kill you just ultimately deal with it until the fight is over and then clean them up afterward.
- THE AMMO. You'll constantly be running out of ammo because of the time to kill but the ammo crates are so far between one another that you'll almost always be down to your pistol, which exasperates the time to kill issue. How you progress through the levels are almost always blocked by locked doors that require you to clear the area first so you HAVE to fight everything. It also loves putting you in a holdoff situation while a door is locked and the providing you ammo on the other side of the door, not when you actually needed it during the holdoff.
- The levels themselves have a little bit of exploration looking for cosmetic crates or credits to buy things from the annoying vendor in the hub. They're still super linear though. Run from point A to point B. Even the ones with objectives need to be completed in a linear order.
- The environments where these levels take place are also bland and boring. Lots of metallic corridors in derelict spaceships. Even then, the spaceships don't feel lived in or have any interesting spots. Just hallways and rooms with bodies in them.
- Sometimes items on the ground just can't be picked up, whoops! Even then the item economy isn't all that interesting. You've got a couple of different ammo types and like mines and grenades etc but they feel ineffective.
- Class depth and customization is actually good but progression is pretty slow. I like the idea of taking perks from other classes and mixing and matching them to make something cool but the idea of playing this game long enough to unlock things on multiple classes is so unappealing.
- Cosmetics are all pretty lame. It looks like a lot of weapon skins but most of them are ultimatley dark grey/black. Decal system didn't work, I wasn't able to scale, reposition or rotate them at all.
This feels like a Xbox 360 game that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin at Walmart but it still costs the same as a modern release.
If you REALLY love Alien, then I'd still recommend you just play the first one, but maybe pick this up on a STEEP sale and keep your expectations low.
This is abysmal compared to other horde shooters on the market. You're better off with basically any other one.
Do better, Cold Iron.
