I got this game because I love the franchise and I thought this game wouldn't be so bad, but oh god I was wrong. This game as a whole took 12 years to develop, only a little less than Duke Nukem Forever. As a result, it ended up looking like an unfinished product rushed at release riddled with bugs and glitches and a terrible storyline, despite the overly long development time. Coincidently enough, these two games were developed by Gearbox Software and they developed both games at the same time. The developers put together a short demo that both looked and played much better than the finished game for E3 and promotional material to cover up how botched the game actually was before release. This led to a class action lawsuit being filed against SEGA and Gearbox. There were also many features showcased that ultimately don't exist in the finished game, such as a flamethrower-equipped Power Loader. The game is too easy, no matter which difficulty settings you use, due to the broken enemy AI and the fact that you have tons of HP. Even the highest difficulty is only harder because it removes the HUD and lets you die because you have no idea how much health you have. To me, it felt paradoxically too HARD. The story is full of plot holes and things that contradict Aliens: for example, it is never explained how Hicks survived, and the reactor building looks in awfully good shape considering the size of the explosion at the end of the movie. The final DLC Stasis Interrupted was entirely based around trying to explain away this plot hole, taking players on a ludicrous journey where it turns out a fat guy got shoved into Hicks' cryo-pod as part of a trip all the way to where Alien 3 is set, only for Weyland-Yutani to capture Hicks and take him right back to LV-426 to punish him by making him be in Aliens: Colonial Marines. While some of the environments look good, the graphics are extremely awful with inexcusably low-res textures and shadows, plastic looking weapons and action figure like character models, and almost zero lighting detail which would be considered outdated and ugly if the game was released in 2011. These required an absolutely massive 4 GB patch to partially fix. The game also overuses lens flare, which can block sight of enemies and can even get you killed. It's even more disappointing when considering how much appealing the early trailers and screenshots for the game looked. Additionally, the cutscenes are very ugly to look at and have very jarring voice acting, lip-sync, lots of compression artifacts, and lack of facial animation which makes it seem like a budget game instead of a triple-A game release. In fact, the voice acting is terrible: in particular, Michael Biehn sounds horribly bored, more so in the DLC which sounds quite literally phoned in. Additionally, poor sound design: In particular, the aliens sound like a bunch of angry cats, and the Pulse Rifle firing sound is taken directly from the films and not looped, meaning that there are frequent pauses where the sound clip stops playing and starts again when firing full-auto. The game is infected with numerous bugs and glitches, such as the aforementioned missing textures, for example, the infamously untextured black vents which reflect absolutely no light and does not respond to fire. A few of these were later fixed, but many remain even today. AI is horrendously programmed. Xenomorphs will jump slowly towards you and then get stuck for a half second delay after landing, which causes them to be basically cannon fodder. The worst cases are that of O‘Neal who often blocks your path and the blind Xenomorphs, the latter of which has been mocked mercilessly. In-game dialog informs that the blind Xenomorphs will detect you if you make a loud enough noise, however, they do not react to sound at all, and in fact, the AI for them is completely broken. Bumping them while crouched does not alert them to your presence. Bouncing on a metal object does not make them detect you, a conversation does not make them detect you, and not even someone cutting down a door with a cutting torch, which makes a very loud noise in-game, will alert them to your presence. Also, for some reason, the Xenomorphs only seem to target you. For example, when the Xenomorphs are in combat with the marine AI, and you come near them, they will stop what they're doing immediately, and try to attack you. On October 31st 2017, a modder discovered that the poor AI was caused by a single typo in one of the INI files (AttachPawnToTeather when it should be AttachPawnToTether). This causes enemy AI to not know which "zone" of the level it is in, therefore it won't use any sneaking or flanking maneuvers. It is too difficult to tell if you are actually hitting the enemy you are targeting. The weapons are extremely inaccurate due to a mechanic discovered by modder TemplarGFX called "Weapon Wandering". It is a simulation of you not being able to hold the gun steady when aiming because of its weight, but in real life, only the weapon wanders, while the shooter's viewpoint remains steady. To compound this bullets don't come out of the gun, but the character. Because of this mechanic, if you're firing at long range and wander by a few pixels, your aim is off by meters! Also, you can only use the M56 Smartgun twice, for about 10 minutes before the end of the level it appears in, and if you're playing this level in the coop mode, only one player can use it at a time. What's worse, you can't bring it with you to the next level. In addition, laser modules for weapons are completely useless, since the laser beam is not offset to indicate the point of impact and instead represents a line drawn straight forward from where the laser actually is on the weapon. Looking at one of the scripted events they clearly wanted you to look at will cause you to be killed by a rocket due to bad enemy placement. Speaking of which, the fact that there are enemy humans, in the form of Weyland-Yutani mercenaries. What makes this terrible is that they ended up stealing the spotlight from the Xenomorphs (who are officially the icon of the franchise) for a couple of levels. Apparently, their addition was mandated by SEGA, who demanded that the game pander to Call of Duty players. Also, terrible and formulaic enemy placements in certain levels. Of the game's 11 levels (including the tutorial), three are focused on the Xenomorphs, another three are focused on the human enemies, and yet another three missions that feature both enemies at the same time. The final boss fight against the Alien Queen is inexcusably anti-climactic. You just try to get away from her (no pun intended), then push a couple of buttons which will then trigger the ending cutscene. Despite Gearbox's claims, the characters are unoriginal and uninspired. And the very poor level design and the broken enemy AI means that it is possible to finish a level from start to finish in only 5 minutes. The multiplayer cooperative mode is very crude and poorly implemented. Competitive online multiplayer can be fun, though obviously these days finding people playing it is difficult at best. What made me want to play with this in the first place?
