one of my friends said "this game is too eager" while playing it recently, and i think that's the game's biggest fault - it has great atmosphere (at least at first, as the game goes on it gets samey) and the creature designs are suitably scary, but the game never lets you bask in the atmosphere too long, terrified of boring the player and instead opting to introduce enemies every time there's an opportunity for downtime. this still can work, and maybe it does; the problem is that the game is also too easy. on medium, i always had enough cash for whatever i wanted. i never had to make hard choices selling items or using my last healing item or even running out of items. i had over 20 medium health packs by the end of my playthrough. perhaps this issue is alleviated on hard, but i'm not exactly eager to hop back into the dreary hallways of the ishimura anytime soon.

besides the lacking difficulty and environmental variety, the story is also a letdown. it doesn't really say anything of value, nor does it really feel like you're making any tantamount progress until you're at the end of the game, just running around in circles, doing busyboy errands for people through your phone. i'd be amiss to mention the wonderful, completely in-universe UI, but that's about the only thing i found truly memorable about this game, i'm sad to say. if you're gonna do alien, at least try and have the same amount of environmental variety as alien!