Recent reviews by fragbuffer

This game is a lot of fun, and just what I was looking for as a long-term Aliens fan. It really looks the part too - the first few levels are fairly standard industrial-complex-with-corridors, but the later levels have some gorgeous details and viewpoints. The weapon perks and abilities are somewhat confusing to make sense of at the beginning, but there's some good depth there with the combinations of bonuses you can make.

It doesn't necessarily feel like it has a lot of legs - I can't see myself playing it for longer than a few months, unless the DLC has some surprises in store - but I'm a huge Aliens fan and this one really hit the spot. Having a maximum of three people on a team is a good number, and makes for some tense firefights. It's structured around a multiplayer campaign, where you and two squadmates play through a series of missions. There appears to be a story, but it's fairly barebones and seems to be just a mechanism to let the voice on the comms to tell you where to go and what button to press. The only thing obviously missing is that the pulse rifle doesn't have an attached grenade launcher (sorely needed for a one-click grenade) - I really hope that's coming in a DLC!

The alien AI isn't very smart, but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to swarm you and try and overwhelm you, and it does that consistently well (with a good few surprises which is nice). They do appear to follow pre-authored navigation paths in some cases though, which makes them a little too easy to pick off, and their animation is quite stiff at times and not fluid, which makes them less scary than they otherwise would be.

The audio is spot on, from gun sounds to the "jump scare" signature stinger when you get a headshot. However it was a big let down for me to not hear the original James Horner score anywhere - I like Austin Wintory's work in general, but I think he missed the mark on this one.

We had heard that the standard difficulty is on the easy side, so we initially went for the next highest setting and got our asses handed to us (in a fun way!). So we went back to the standard difficulty in order to build up our gear & perks, but it really is too easy - there's not much fear of dying. It was still fun though, and you do feel like a badass when the team is working together and beating back the swarm. The gunplay is good in general, and the shotgun is particularly satisfying (I keep it handy for close encounters). There are a lot of weapon mods and perks which you can use in-game currency to buy, and no doubt helps you to tackle the higher difficulties. I'm not sure that's enough for long-term replayability though; since the campaign is linear, once you've seen an area then you very quickly know what to expect, which takes some of the fun out of things. Some of the best bits of the game are when you're nervous and not knowing what direction the aliens are going to come from.

[Edit - I had a problem with playing on a 32:9 ultrawide, but that got sorted in the latest patch - many thanks!]

Overall it's a big thumbs up from me.

Loving what I've played of this so far! I played the board game and this does a great job of recreating the spirit and fun of it, and adds some great flourishes and flairs on top. The tutorial is great too, which is really important in a game like this.

Looking forward to getting more stuck in!

Fantastic game - really engaging, beautiful to look at, and the strongest writing and voice acting of any recent game I can think of. Definitely recommended.

Awesome game - a proper challenging roguelike shoot-em-up that is easy to get into but has a surprising amount of depth. Lots of funny touches, and seriously addictive. Great value for the price.