A third person horde focused co-op shooter for up to three players (you can also be joined by up to two synthetic AI if you are playing alone or with one other person) focusing on a ship of marines investigating a distress signal in the Aliens universe. The game is broken up into four acts with three missions in each and focusing on investigating the Katanga refinery and the planet that it orbits, LV-895.
Each player can play as one of six classes including the Gunner, Demolisher, Technician, Doc, Phalanx, and Recon (with the recon class only unlocking once you beat the campaign and the Phalanx being a recent free addition to the game. Each class carries two weapons, one each of their two available types (rifle, heavy, handgun, and CQW), has a passive and two activate abilities, and a class based board where they can assign class skills and universal modifiers to improve their weapons and abilities by slotting in skills to open slots on the board. Each weapon can have three attachments that can change the look of the weapon and add to things like fire rate, range, accuracy, handling, stability, max ammo, magazine capacity, weak point damage, etc as well as having a variety of varied passive benefits such as increasing stats when you hit enemy weak points or giving a chance of leaving behind trails of fire after killing an enemy. Each gun can also be leveled up up to four times with each increasing passive benefits. You also get access to consumable items that you can set up to help you while defending positions like a variety of turrets, mines, devices that stun enemies, and incendiary rounds you can load into your weapons.
There is a good variety of classes and weapons including ones that look and sound faithful to the film like the smartgun, flamethrowers, pulse rifle, and Hick's shotgun. The flame effects look great and even though you won't be able to see it well yourself with the third person camera you can see the ammo indicator on the side of the pulse rifle counting down your remaining shots. Class wise I always stuck with the Technician and Demolisher, the Technician being able to set up a turret and throw up to three devices that set up an electrical field that slows enemies (or that can be stuck to an enemy) and the Demolisher being the only class to be able to use heavy weapons like the smartgun, miniguns, the largest flamethrower, and rocket launchers and having a shoulder mounted rocket launcher and an AoE blast that knocks back and stumbles nearby enemies. The Doc can heal and buff himself and allies, the Gunner has abilities that improve his combat abilities and can raise the fire rate of everyone's weapons for a short time, the Phalanx has a protective shield they carry, and the Recon is a bit of a jack of all trades focusing on hitting enemy weak points, putting down a drone that heals and gives ammo, and PUPS drones that fly out and can for and weaken enemies.
Between missions you can walk around your ship and interact with other characters, learning more about the universe when it comes to the aliens, marines, different corporations, laws, and characters, a lot of the conversations activated by finding intel in the games missions (with each mission having three hidden intel pieces). You also get access to a vender that can sell you weapons, attachments, and cosmetics. Weapons have a variety of colors and cosmetic stickers you can put on them in addition to the attachments. The speed that you unlock weapons, attachments, and cosmetics is a lot better than many other games out there. Certain missions just reward you with guns, playing on certain difficulties can reward you with secret weapons, you gain credits fairly quickly that you can choose to spend on whatever you want and in each mission there are places a crate can spawn, usually not very difficult to find, that will give you three items that you don't already have.
The campaign is short, probably about four hours if you are just playing through it once, but features varied and good looking locations. Objectives are basically never changing though, with the exception of one escort mission in the first act, you will always be moving through an area until you get to a part where you have to interact with some device or scan something which triggers and assault of enemies you have to defend against before moving on. It would have been nice to see more variety there. What does help with the variety is that there are five difficulties, a variety of cards that you can play before a mission starts to cause a different missions effects that can either make you stronger or weaken you in different ways while increasing your credit and experience rewards. Cards can have effects like causing your weapons to jam, slowing down recharge rates of abilities, causing players to knock each other over if they run into each other, they can change the look of the game, add side objects like needing a certain number of headshot kills or completing the level with no one being downed, etc.
Levels also tend to bring in new enemy types to them. Stronger aliens show up over time, which are going to be your primary antagonists, but you will also run into synthetics either a variety of ones made for combat and armed with ranged and melee weapons or the weak Average Joe models that were a much bigger inconvenience in Alien Isolation. Ranged combat against synthetics isn't bad but it is the game's weak point and the whole reason the game has a cover system you will likely not be making much use of. Aliens types include the normal drones, warrior types, crushers with heavily armored skulls, the queen defending praetorians, predators that try to hide in the environment and pounce on you, ones that spit acid, ones that explode acid when killed, facehuggers, and eggs holding facehuggers that will break open if you get to close before destroying them. The warriors are really the only disappointing enemy type. They awkwardly lift you up and just kind of hold you while you take damage until they are either killed or you break free of their grasp, it's like they should just kill their target outright with the alien's headbite attack but the developers realized they would be really overpowered with the way they made them so they just kind of stand their awkwardly.
Once the campaign is completed you will unlock two additional game modes. A traditional horde mode and a similar mode but where you have to defend different points, each is limited to only one map though, which is odd considering there are likely places from the campaign that could have been easily adapted.
It's a fun time, a bit short on content and the focus on fighting synthetics in a couple missions just isn't that enjoyable but good mechanics, a fair unlock system that isn't focused on wasting your time or wanting you to buy DLC, and a good use of the Aliens license. Based on their content roadmap, at least three more updates are planned with them listing new weapons and the two bigger additional possibly being one that looks to be adding another class type and one that says it will add a new feature. Nothing lists any planned campaign missions being free or DLC or mentions additional horde mode maps so that is a little disappointing.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1477064742816546816
Each player can play as one of six classes including the Gunner, Demolisher, Technician, Doc, Phalanx, and Recon (with the recon class only unlocking once you beat the campaign and the Phalanx being a recent free addition to the game. Each class carries two weapons, one each of their two available types (rifle, heavy, handgun, and CQW), has a passive and two activate abilities, and a class based board where they can assign class skills and universal modifiers to improve their weapons and abilities by slotting in skills to open slots on the board. Each weapon can have three attachments that can change the look of the weapon and add to things like fire rate, range, accuracy, handling, stability, max ammo, magazine capacity, weak point damage, etc as well as having a variety of varied passive benefits such as increasing stats when you hit enemy weak points or giving a chance of leaving behind trails of fire after killing an enemy. Each gun can also be leveled up up to four times with each increasing passive benefits. You also get access to consumable items that you can set up to help you while defending positions like a variety of turrets, mines, devices that stun enemies, and incendiary rounds you can load into your weapons.
There is a good variety of classes and weapons including ones that look and sound faithful to the film like the smartgun, flamethrowers, pulse rifle, and Hick's shotgun. The flame effects look great and even though you won't be able to see it well yourself with the third person camera you can see the ammo indicator on the side of the pulse rifle counting down your remaining shots. Class wise I always stuck with the Technician and Demolisher, the Technician being able to set up a turret and throw up to three devices that set up an electrical field that slows enemies (or that can be stuck to an enemy) and the Demolisher being the only class to be able to use heavy weapons like the smartgun, miniguns, the largest flamethrower, and rocket launchers and having a shoulder mounted rocket launcher and an AoE blast that knocks back and stumbles nearby enemies. The Doc can heal and buff himself and allies, the Gunner has abilities that improve his combat abilities and can raise the fire rate of everyone's weapons for a short time, the Phalanx has a protective shield they carry, and the Recon is a bit of a jack of all trades focusing on hitting enemy weak points, putting down a drone that heals and gives ammo, and PUPS drones that fly out and can for and weaken enemies.
Between missions you can walk around your ship and interact with other characters, learning more about the universe when it comes to the aliens, marines, different corporations, laws, and characters, a lot of the conversations activated by finding intel in the games missions (with each mission having three hidden intel pieces). You also get access to a vender that can sell you weapons, attachments, and cosmetics. Weapons have a variety of colors and cosmetic stickers you can put on them in addition to the attachments. The speed that you unlock weapons, attachments, and cosmetics is a lot better than many other games out there. Certain missions just reward you with guns, playing on certain difficulties can reward you with secret weapons, you gain credits fairly quickly that you can choose to spend on whatever you want and in each mission there are places a crate can spawn, usually not very difficult to find, that will give you three items that you don't already have.
The campaign is short, probably about four hours if you are just playing through it once, but features varied and good looking locations. Objectives are basically never changing though, with the exception of one escort mission in the first act, you will always be moving through an area until you get to a part where you have to interact with some device or scan something which triggers and assault of enemies you have to defend against before moving on. It would have been nice to see more variety there. What does help with the variety is that there are five difficulties, a variety of cards that you can play before a mission starts to cause a different missions effects that can either make you stronger or weaken you in different ways while increasing your credit and experience rewards. Cards can have effects like causing your weapons to jam, slowing down recharge rates of abilities, causing players to knock each other over if they run into each other, they can change the look of the game, add side objects like needing a certain number of headshot kills or completing the level with no one being downed, etc.
Levels also tend to bring in new enemy types to them. Stronger aliens show up over time, which are going to be your primary antagonists, but you will also run into synthetics either a variety of ones made for combat and armed with ranged and melee weapons or the weak Average Joe models that were a much bigger inconvenience in Alien Isolation. Ranged combat against synthetics isn't bad but it is the game's weak point and the whole reason the game has a cover system you will likely not be making much use of. Aliens types include the normal drones, warrior types, crushers with heavily armored skulls, the queen defending praetorians, predators that try to hide in the environment and pounce on you, ones that spit acid, ones that explode acid when killed, facehuggers, and eggs holding facehuggers that will break open if you get to close before destroying them. The warriors are really the only disappointing enemy type. They awkwardly lift you up and just kind of hold you while you take damage until they are either killed or you break free of their grasp, it's like they should just kill their target outright with the alien's headbite attack but the developers realized they would be really overpowered with the way they made them so they just kind of stand their awkwardly.
Once the campaign is completed you will unlock two additional game modes. A traditional horde mode and a similar mode but where you have to defend different points, each is limited to only one map though, which is odd considering there are likely places from the campaign that could have been easily adapted.
It's a fun time, a bit short on content and the focus on fighting synthetics in a couple missions just isn't that enjoyable but good mechanics, a fair unlock system that isn't focused on wasting your time or wanting you to buy DLC, and a good use of the Aliens license. Based on their content roadmap, at least three more updates are planned with them listing new weapons and the two bigger additional possibly being one that looks to be adding another class type and one that says it will add a new feature. Nothing lists any planned campaign missions being free or DLC or mentions additional horde mode maps so that is a little disappointing.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1477064742816546816