Far from perfect but unique and impressively atmospheric. Base and squad management was easily its weak point... weapons, class skills, and Xenotech unlocks were good but nothing about the barracks, workshop, medical, or lab makes your time aboard the Otago satisfying. The psych bay and therapy mechanic were cringily presented, thematically jarring, and decidedly un-bad@ss. You can go to therapy after we get off this rock, not in the middle of this war zone! I'd rather a cigar chomping Apone come Patton slap my ultimate bad-@sses back to the front line than envision them getting hugged by the Otago's touchy feely doc for 5 days. Similarly cringey were some mewling cinematics between missions where characters talk about their feelings, it comes off as very forced and melodramatic. The story was mostly good however the poorly explained telepathy was beyond cheesy and out of place. The ending mission was cool but did not feel like a satisfying culmination of your effort. There seemed to be a jarringly cheap feminist slant throughout… there were few believable characters like Aliens’ Ripley, Vasquez, Ferro, and Deitrich and in their place seemed a disproportionate number of hollow token characters …after some eye rolling I wondered if I was playing a game about Colonial Marines or watching “Women in Spaaaaaaace!” Despite these shortcomings the developers PERFECTLY captured the vibe of the Aliens movie… the setting, the pace, the music, the sounds, the dread, and the adrenaline! Level design was great, the challenge was perfect, tactics and the real time squad control mechanics were great fun… all this made missions equally satisfying and terrifying. I’m not sure if everyone would be so impressed but I think classic Aliens fans will find this game’s fantastic and faithful atmosphere reason enough to enjoy.

Mix of RPG and FPS, only the roleplaying and the shooting sucks hard. Character creation is a joke: stats have minimal impact on gameplay, skills too easily and too quickly max out, and most perks just boringly add skill points... every character inevitably turns out the same and hits max level before finishing the base game. Some skills were borderline pointless as was food, drinks, and drugs in general. The dialogue system is shallow and choices, if any, are limited and rarely have meaningful or satisfying consequences. There are not enough interesting towns to visit, Megaton was the only area that felt semi-complete, other settlements only consisted of a few buildings and useless people, none which felt the least bit believable. Moira in Megaton is one of the worst written characters in video game history and a shining example that Bethesda doesn't understand Fallout humor. Similarly, the vampires and treeminders should have stayed out of Fallout 3 and remained on Oblivion's cutting room floor. The weapons, especially energy weapons, were incredibly lacking and combat outside of VATS was deplorable. The storyline was terrible, the world was bland, there weren't enough sidequests to stay interesting, and voice acting was terrible. Navigating DC was just a pain and the maps were terribly unhelpful. With all that said, the game did do a good job of making killing feral ghouls in a dark cellar effectively spooky. This game is not deserving of the Fallout name, nor do I believe it is a good game in general, how people seemed impressed by its rampant mediocrity I'll never understand. Forget this game like Star Wars Episodes 1-3 and Indiana Jones 4...