- Singleplayer :
You can play this singleplayer, with bots however it is bots. So they might not always know when it's the best time to use X Y or Z ability, however they are fairly good shooters. Probably about the average gamer level, more than good enough for you to complete the entire campaign on Standard, as long sa you pull your own weight.

- Multiplayer :
The campaign is 4 arcs each with 3 chapters. - As you complete the missions you can replay them for rewards and exp, the encounters are random although the defend against horde areas are the same, but enemy placement and composition in attacks and where and when varies.
Once you complete a mission you get rewards, usually cosmetics for your weapons, along with an attachment for a weapon or a weapon and other goodies.
You get exp for your character, your class and your weapons. As you get higher levels you unlock new modifiers and other perks to customize your loadout and you can vastly change your playstyle though this.

Once you complete the campaign, you gain access to Horde mode, which personally is not as fun. But it's a thing some people enjoy, I prefer doing the campaign with increased difficulty.
As of the date this review is written, there is no option to "Quick Play", meaning if you want to play the campaign with people you have to pick which mission you want, and hope others picked the same mission that you did, even if you don't care which mission you play and just want to play with someone, you still have to pick and hope you find someone. A quickplay option is highly needed in my opinion.

There are also challenge cards, which can either add benefits or negative effects for your team during the mission, if its a negative effect you are rewarded with exp or credits, a negative effect could be that you are only allowed to use 1 of your 2 weapons.

Note: I have not experienced any disconnect issue when playing this game online with randoms. 20 hours played.

- Customization :
You can create your own character, your very own marine. Although the character creator is very light with very few options, it is there. I am happy to have some sort of character creator rather than playing Geralt, or another person I cannot relate to. The ability to create your OWN character is nice, and should be more common.

Character specialization and classes; there are 5 different classes, one of which you unlock after the campaign. They each serve their own purpose. Neither seems over-powered or under-powered. They did a really good job here making them all feels equally exciting and balanced in their own aspect. You don't feel a class is bad, but you might feel it's just not your playstyle however.
For as Demolisher you can either focus on dealing damage, or build yourself to be able to do CC on stronger enemies. That way you can effectively have 2 demolishers on the team, without feeling you should only have 1 of each class, because you can customize you class to be different, and with that said. It's also perfectly viable to have 2 Demolishers who uses their stun build so you have 2 CC built demolishers which gives you a lot more control during large fights with many strong foes. You can build yourself to be good at clearing multiple small enemies, or just build around focusing stronger enemies.

Basically you can play what you want, without feeling like you have to play something else because you and your friends might want to play the same thing, in this game it's viable to play the same thing and it works.

Weapons got a lot of attachments as well, barrel, scope, mag and more. So you can make or fine tune the weapon you like. Speaking of The Weapon you like, all weapons are viable, despite not having access to them all at once, it's mostly about what weapon you prefer to use.

- Longevity :
The depth of customization and the freedom of how all the modifiers and perks work universal between all classes opens the game up for a long of options in customization and thus giving this game a fairly good possibility for a long lifespan. However, as I said earlier; The game is missing a "Quick Play" feature, so you can't just join people, you have to hope you find people as you pick a mission. This makes it a lot harder to see this game having a long lifespan beyond the initial playthrough of the campaign and perhaps a few horde missions. The campaign length is about 6-9 hours I'd guess. This point I will correct with more accurate information once I got more time to play it, with more accurate numbers. Outside of that there is a decent longevity in unlocking modifiers and opening up the perk Tetris talent game. You get a lot of new and exciting things and combinations you want to try out, which kept my interest thus far 20 hours in. You will see for how much longer by my hours played.

- Level Design :
I added this point because it deserves to get noted how well they actually designed the levels, and how faithful a lot of the maps scenic are to the movies, from all the alien based movies. You got pretty much everything you seen from every movie that the aliens is based on and their origin. A lot of cool references spread throughout the campaign.


- Performance :
They already had a performance update 1 day after release; I heard people who had a RTX 2080 runs the game around 40FPS, before this patch running on medium settings. and 100fps on a RTX 3080, before the patch on high settings. This speaks to a poorly optimized game.
That was just what I heard people say. Now that I got my hands on the game myself, and with the performance patch in place, I run the game at 100fps on high settings, with a GTX1070. - I am not quite sure how much changed in this patch, but I am running the game fairly well. 100fps with a GTX1070 was more than I hoped for.
So I feel this game is at this point in time fairly well optimized.

- Final thoughts :
If you like Aliens and like shooters, I would say this is a must buy, definitely worth it.
If you are just a fan of shooters, I would also say there is a great deal of fun to be had if you like these kind of horde shooter games.

If you do not like shooters you wouldn't even consider this game, and you cannot play as an Alien.
If you don't like horde shooter games, or other PvE shooters, then you probably also don't like this game.

I feel this game is a mix of Left 4 Dead with some The Division 2 and a coating of Aliens on top.
Thus this game is outright better than Left 4 Dead, because of the level of customizations you have on both weapons and classes.

Budget / Marketing :
It’s clear they had a very limited budget to this, but seems like they spent money on what mattered to make a good game. This in turn however also means the budget for marketing were small, perhaps too small. Because I’m worried this game goes under the radar for a lot of people, and I feel like they deserve more attention than they are getting. The weapon and class depth really adds a lot of value to the game, and I rather have cool specialization mechanics with a lot of freedom instead of just having lip sync during dialogue. But nowadays you almost have to have a sponsored twitch marketing campaign before launch to get good sales numbers, which they didn’t do. Unlike Back 4 Blood and other new games, this game almost didn’t spend any money on marketing. However this game sets a new standard for horde shooter games in the level of customization those games should have, and will be a thing I will refer to in the future for new games. As I feel customization and personalization of your character is very important for games.

It's more Aliens than Alien.
If you're expecting a more horror or suspense type pacing I'd suggest Alien: Isolation.

Action, third person horde based shooter with a surprising amount of customization options and upgrade choices.
I'd suggest playing on Intense if you're playing Co-Op with other players to start off with and you're familiar with shooters.

+ Great atmosphere and soundtrack.
+ Build variety with the perk system, modifiers and weapon customization is awesome
+ Gameplay is pretty solid, gunplay is satisfying, the currently available classes are varied enough with different strengths
+ Environment art, weapon models, alien models are great.
+ Aliens animations are good, deaths are varied, they don't just flop around weightless and ragdolled.
+ Nice callbacks and easter eggs to the Aliens movies, comics and toys. I bet the devs were big fans of the series.
+ Seasonal gameplay updates will add new classes and other additions for free.

- Really needs a better Matchmaking system, Quickplay or a Lobby. There's no "Any Map" option currently. If you plan on using matchmaking vs playing with others you know it could make it difficult. Devs just released a patch today (Aug 29) "Fix for matchmaking issue that could keep players from finding teams." Hopefully that helps some people.
- Would benefit from Voicechat or Text Chat for people who are not playing with friends.
- FOV Options would be nice or multiple third person zoom & angles. At the moment you have to do some modding.
- Both bots seem to be gunner class, for those that like playing solo it'd be nice to be able to customize your bot's loadout and class. It'd be very difficult to solo with two bots on Intense through the campaign at the moment. Other players are really needed.
- Needs crouch, only being able to stand hurts on higher difficulties with friendly fire penalties and narrow corridors in some areas.

*Would be great to see a DM, TDM, or versus mode some day if possible. I miss AvP 2 Multiplayer.
*I'd love a first person mode as an option.

**Edit**

Around 22hrs in now since release. I could see some people getting 25-35hrs out of this easily if you max out two classes playing at the intense difficulty with friends through the campaign a few times. Progressing through multiple classes is helpful because they have "universal" perks and modifiers that unlock you can use with other classes.

If going through waves of horde mode is your thing, that will give you even more replay value along with upcoming game additions.

As someone who has been starving for a new good horde shooter as well as a new game based on the Aliens franchise this game did not disappoint. However there are issues that needs to be addressed.

What i Liked :
Gameplay is very fun 60+ hours in and im still not tired of it
Enemy variety is decent enough
Plenty of unlockables keeps grinding and difficulty progression interesting.
No Microtransactions
Gunplay is solid , and atmosphere is spot on
Music gets a 10/10 from me keeps the spirit of the movie while being its own composition.
Best co-op aliens game to date

What i disliked:
Content in terms of missions is very barebones.
Can get repetitive quickly for people who are not big fans of the franchise.
Ai bots are dumb af
Matchmaking is terrible and needs to be addressed immediately.
No bossfights.
Story is pointless and the ending is extremely anticlimactic.
Still has some game breaking bugs which render missions unwinnable.
Missions have the same repetition of hallway, open area, . fight final waves etc.

For $40 id say this game is a buy only if you're a hardcore fan of the aliens franchise otherwise wait for a sale or till more dlc is released and the issues are addressed. but i definitely got my money's worth.

Ai isnt useless.
Atmosphere reminds me of the movies.
Soundtrack is ominous af.
Aliens on ceilings = Good time

Ps. Needs Ultrawide Support ASAP

The positives:

* The game isn’t Aliens: Colonial Marines. That is a joke but it’s also a positive, and I’ll get to why now:
* Even on Standard mode, the game is quite challenging. The first mission is pretty easy but the difficulty quickly amps up. A negative I’ll cite up front is that like with Aliens: Colonial Marines (but not as severely as Aliens: Colonial Marines), the generic fodder Aliens will rush you head-on, making them pretty easy to kill, but the good news is that they not only will flank you and make full use of the terrain, but there are a *lot* of them and they can actually do some damage to you. Acid blood damage is cause for concern, and since you don’t have regenerating health (it follows the same health kit formula as World War Z, Left 4 Dead/2, etc.), it’s more of a challenge. I'm sure when you dial up the difficulty and add Challenge Cards, things get even crazier.
* Graphically, this game is fantastic. Everything from character and weapon models to map design to visual effects like jets of flame or acid splashes is awesome. It also runs really well (but read the negatives section for a caveat to that); that and the visual quality of this just blows my mind.
* Performance-wise, I had a great frame rate with little lag. There were some glitches, which I’ll get to momentarily, but overall performance is good.
* The game doesn’t seem too story driven, but the lore and story presented is more sensible and interesting than it is in Aliens: Colonial Marines.
* Marine character customization, at least so far, doesn’t seem to top the amazing character customization in Aliens: Colonial Marines (and yeah, that’s one of the few good things about Aliens: Colonial Marines), but weapons and classes are a different ballgame. Whereas Aliens: Colonial Marines had about 9-12 attachments per gun, there are so many more options here that have a more profound effect on your weapons.
* There are character classes, which is pretty damn dope. If you lamented the fact that co-op play in Aliens: Colonial Marines was kind of generic, well now you can be the squad’s Smartgunner, or you can be a medic, or whatever you want to do.
* A minor positive, a personal win with me, is that in Aliens: Colonial Marines and the Aliens vs. Predator games, certain weapons like the Smartgun and flamethrower were power weapons that you had limited access to and limited ammo for. In this game, they’re part of your standard loadout and restock at regular ammo crates, so for the first time, you really get to make full use of those weapons and it is AWESOME.
* This game is absolutely bloated with Alien lore and references so much stuff that the pinheads who made Aliens: Colonial Marines probably didn’t know about. In particular, if you play the Alien tabletop roleplaying game, this thing references that game’s lore (which is canon and heavily fleshed out) incessantly, so if you’re as big of a geek re: Alien as I am, this game will really put a smile on your face.
* Sound design is a mixed bag. On one hand, the weapons sound kind of muted and weak, but on the other hand, and this kind of ties into my previous positive – this game is a love letter to previous Alien games in terms of its sound design – the motion tracker sounds just like it did in Aliens versus Predator 2, I recognized certain sounds from Alien: Isolation, etc.. Alien screeches are closer to what we’ve heard elsewhere rather than the weird sounds from Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The negatives:

* Yes, it is another “A-to-B-horde-mode” co-op shooter that’s attempting to be World War Z but with Xenomorphs. That doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable, but it definitely is a negative.
* One of the only positives about Aliens: Colonial Marines was that there was drop in, drop out co-op in everything ranging from the campaigns to Bug Hunt. Shockingly, this game lacks that, which basically means that if you disconnect from a mission and need to rejoin, you can’t do so once it’s started, and if one person quits and another one wants to play, you have to end the mission you’re on (and it’s not like games like Halo where there are save checkpoints – you have to start each section again) and start anew.
* The soundtrack. The soundtrack itself isn't bad and is well-composed, but it's about the worst soundtrack you could possibly have put in. When playing with two friends, one of them started cracking up at the soundtrack and remarked that it sounds like Ewok music. Right then and there, that sums up the soundtrack.
* Three players instead of four? Really? If the devs were worried about it being too easy with four, they were mistaken because it’s brutal with just two or three (and I can’t even fathom solo play, not that any sane person would do so since this is meant to be a co-op shooter), and considering that I have a pretty large circle of friends who own this game and are really into Alien, this is kind of a nutshot to me/to us since that means if we have four people, it’s either one person gets left out or we split into two pairs.
* Don’t try downloading/running this game on a hard disk drive. I’m sure a lot of snobs out there will condescendingly laugh at the idea of people running games on HDDs, but when I tried doing so (I just picked the device with the most storage space), I got to the mission hub, but when I tried starting a mission, I was stuck on a loading screen while my two teammates were in the level and moving around.
* Since I mentioned glitches earlier, I’ll say that there were some problems that me and my friends came across while playing within the first few hours after launch. For starters, there was an Alien glitched through a window and sliding across it; also, when two of my buddies were playing together (because we had four people instead of three and it wouldn’t be fair or kind to leave someone out, we split into two pairs), they apparently reached a door that wouldn’t open, meaning they had to restart the entire level.
* There isn’t any PvP available in the game, and before you go “Wow, newb, not every game has to have PvP, GOSH!”, remember that this game, like I said, is in the same genre as Left 4 Dead 2 and that game has PvP (where it’s basically the survivors still trying to get to the end of the level, but there’s a team of players controlling special zombies and trying to stop the survivors – you could have easily done that with this game and it would’ve made things more intense and much more enjoyable). I’m not asking for a team deathmatch mode, but when all is said and done, it would’ve been nice if there was *something*.
* Crossplay isn’t an option, sadly.
* This game’s exclusively third person POV like World War Z before it, which may bother some people. If modding ever occurs for this game, people could potentially pull a Grand Theft Auto IV and add a first person POV mod, but for the time being it’s exclusively in third.

The verdict:

For over a decade, we’ve lacked a good cooperative Alien shooter game, and a good Alien game hasn’t been seen since 2014. Fireteam changes things up and scratches that years-long itch. The game has several problems going for it, yeah, but I can probably pull more positives out of this game than I can with Aliens: Colonial Marines. Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a game that’s meant to be played with friends and you’ll have a great time blasting Xenos with your pals, and as a result I wouldn’t recommend this game to solo players. I would, however, recommend it to people who A) adore Alien as much as I do (if that’s possible); and B) are really into the whole co-op horde shooter thing, so if you enjoy stuff like World War Z or Left 4 Dead, then grab this game. The fact that it’s 40 bucks instead of 60 kind of sweetens the deal.

Thanks devs for disabling mods, this will surely make the playerbase happy and the game to succeed. Nothing can go wrong now.
Oh, I forgot to turn the sarcasm off.


Devs,
you still have time to rollback this decision or implement options like FOV and better Bots. People were fixing your game with mods, and now you don't allow that. It seems you want players to abandon the game.

---

2022 jan 20
PATCH 1.0.2.92826:
No mention of mods. No fix for FOV nor bots.

Go die in a fire, stupid game, and thanks for nothing, useless developers.

Great game torn apart by horrible match making decisions and likely a confused game producer that needs to give a bit(all) more power back to the design team. Can they save it? Probably. They took too much from poor L4D clones and not enough from games like Vermintide.

If you are making one of these games by the spawning become predictable you're doing it wrong.
If your answer to difficulty is to just make bullet sponges and low health players you're doing it wrong.
If your player base is crumbling away and your AI isn't good enough to complete a mission you're doing it wrong.

If you have more buyable aesthetics than a F2P game but the player base wants actual gameplay you're doing it wrong.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite. There's a lot to love, and a lot to hate.

The good
•The core game-play is fun. It's a third person shooter. Nothing overly complex, just simple alien-gibbing fun.

•The story is exceptional as far as aliens games go. Don't listen to youtube reviewers who trash the story. Yes, the story is minimal if you just blast through missions. But if you explore the levels and gather the hidden intelligence artifacts, you are given a wealth of background information that is both pertinent to the story and awesome world building in general

•The characters aren't overly annoying. Unlike some previous titles in the franchise, you don't get a lot of bombastic one-liners and quips, and no "oorah to ashes". Right up until the last two or so missions, they're all more-or-less professional (if just a tiny bit cartoony in places.)

•The music is great. Early on during the marketing hype for the game, I was worried because the music samples we were shown seemed like they belonged in a HALO Flood sequence more so than an Aliens game. The James Horner style was absent. Luckily, I was wrong. While there are some deviations, the classic Aliens style is very present and the newer stuff compliments it great. You go from rolling drums to riffs which I can only described as "Flight of the Angry Bumble Bee."

•The "perk grid" system is fun to toy around with for RPG lovers and allows you great flexibility in tailoring your marine class.

The bad
First off, I have to address the elephant in the room. During the initial marketing hype for the game, Cold Iron made abundantly clear that all gameplay-related DLC would be free. The post-release monetization of the game was to come in the form of optional cosmetic packs. At some point, they have quietly edited posts making this initial claim. They then announced the upcoming Pathogen DLC, which will not be free. Price is TBA as of the writing of this review. Clever users who did not buy in to the gas-lighting were able to track down (one of) the original posts thanks to internet archives.

Fans of the game and Cold Iron like to hand wave it as people who are upset having just "misunderstood" claims made regarding DLC. However, there was no misunderstanding.

The original claim in this thread (which has since been edited,) posted by developer Honourael, reads as follows:

Q: Will there be DLC or a Season Pass? Will any of the DLC include microtransactions and / or lootboxes?
A: We plan on continuing to support the game after launch with updates and new content. Any purchasable content will be purely cosmetic. We’ll reveal more details about these plans at a later date.

This was later changed to read:

Q: Will there be DLC or a Season Pass? Will any of the DLC include microtransactions and / or lootboxes?
A: Aliens: Fireteam Elite does include a Season Pass which gives a year’s worth of access to our cosmetic DLC packs. These DLC packs release at the same time as our free content releases.

You can find the original post here.[web.archive.org]

If you do not mind this sort of anti-consumer behavior, then fair enough. Critiques of the game itself are as follows:

•The game, currently, possesses a great many guns; 43 or so. Some of these are starkly better than others, with the worst ones being a hazard to your own team. They went with a quantity over quality approach, and it shows. Balance is a mess. Some weapons are just an absolute pain to use. This isn't just a case of "of course some guns are better than others. That's just how it always goes in games." This is some of the guns actually being detrimental to use. Currently, the game's meta revolves around roughly 6 weapons being usable at maximum difficulty. That's about 14% of the inventory.

•As of writing this review, PC Steam clients are unable to use VOIP. The function simply is not there. The developers have cut that corner for PC, reasoning that PC players can simply use programs like Discord. The issue is that the game uses random matchmaking, which means that the people you run into via matchmaking probably aren't going to be on your Discord friends list. This co-op game that demands communication gives no real communication tools, and it suffers for it especially at higher difficulty levels.

•Some of the classes, the "Doc" in particular, are just poorly designed from the ground-up. It's complicated and probably wouldn't do well to describe the entire situation here, but his healing station can only be recharged by team mates picking up curative items. They can only carry one each, and everyone starts with one. So if the Doc is staying on top of heals, and you reach a supply checkpoint with no one hurt, they are unable to use their healing items so that they can pick up new ones and thus recharge the station. The only recourse is to stop and shoot each other in the face so people can use their kits and then pick up new its.

If it sounds confusing and bizarre, it's because it is. If you plan to play a healer, this isn't the game for you. Other classes also suffer from the general symptoms of power creep and being left behind as new classes come out.

•The game holds your hand to some insulting degrees. From pointing you directly to every objective (discouraging exploration) to calling out supposedly hidden enemies, it's clear that the developers think you're an idiot. My personal "favorite" example of this is that the Prowler, a type of alien that randomly spawns behind pre-set corners of the level to attack players, gives an audio queue that he is present in the form of hissing. You can also outright see him in a lot of cases before you even cross his hiding place. This should be more than enough. But on top of that, your character breaks the fourth wall to inform you of the presence of a prowler in the room. It's dumb. All "elites" are verbally called out as well, whether appropriate or not.

•Difficulty in this game is the definition of artificial. There's not much to say. As you increase difficulty, the only thing that changes are the raw stats of the enemies (particularly hit points, which just balloon beyond the point of absurdity) and a reduction in the player's ammo pool, giving you less resources to deal with shamelessly inflated bullet sponges. The AI doesn't change, there are no real scripting changes, the enemies don't start coming out of different crawl spaces or use new attacks or behaviors. It's just lazy number increases/decreases.

•The enemies are bland outside of their Aliens-relevant skin. You got your spitting enemy, your grappling enemy, your charging enemy - it's all so uncreative and bland.

In conclusion:
The really hard part of this review is choosing my recommendation. From a moral standpoint regarding the DLC drama described earlier, as well as the lazy development, I'm going to say "no". The first year of season content drops were things like the introduction of Quick Play (this wasn't in from the beginning) and attempts at Cross Play culminating in their recent announcement of full Cross Play in July. While we did get a few new classes (which while nice, ultimately weren't needed) and new guns (many of which are mediocre at best,) this first year has largely been Cold Iron scrambling to finish development of an otherwise incomplete product.

Fans of Cold Iron are quick to point out the game's less-than-AAA price tag, at 39.99 USD. While true, you can only hide behind that for so long while incompetent development priorities mount. Animations break, bugs go unfixed, features missing, yadda yadda.

However, if you're just looking for a game to entertain yourself with friends, this will do okay. I guess.

So if your reading this review then your probably looking at if this game is for you or not. From a personal stand point? I enjoy this game. Even after fully leveling all classes and collecting everything I can I'm still playing this. With that said lets jump into the breakdown of this game.

Positives

-Classes: Each class has their own unique game-play. With a perk grid that allows you to enhance your both your primary and passive ability with core class perks. And each class unlocks universal perks to further buff your abilities or weapons in the missions you play through. So there is a welcome degree of flexibility as you progress through the game. Current classes in game are: Gunner, Demolitionist, Technician, Doc, and Recon which you unlock at the completion of the campaign

-Weapons: The weapons all feel unique and don't feel like a copy and paste of each other. You will find that you prefer some weapons over others and each person you encounter in the games community will have their own preference as well.

-Cosmetics & Emotes: There is a HUGE pool of cosmetics you can collect as the game goes on and you play. Weapon Cosmetics, Player apparel, weapon decals, and emotes. All of it you can find in the mission from hidden crates and purchase within the requisition shop. There are NO micro-transactions within the game.

-Enemy Types: There is a fairly large pool of enemy variants within the game as you go through the missions. Some with sub variants that trigger on the map. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by this.

-Missions: The missions fit well into playing off the lore of the Aliens universe with how the combat happens in enclosed and slightly open spaces. If your a fan of the Aliens universe you will appreciate the feel of the maps for the missions.

-Game-play: The game-play while repetitive is enjoyable as a hoard shooter. If you enjoyed Vermintide, Left for Dead, World War Z, and those games that are designed around it you will find this game enjoyable. And if you like Aliens and you like killing Aliens then the game-play loop will keep you entertained while you play with friends or other players.

-Lore & Story: There is lore and there is story in the game. You can collect intel scattered through the maps of the missions of the campaigns. Each mission has 3 sources of intel that will trigger dialogue with certain individuals on the ship of the Endeavor while you progress through the story. Which may provide insight into future missions that will be released in the future. As a fan of the universe I found it all enjoyable to read and listen to.

-Community: They have a community discord which you can search for other players to play with on your respective channels. In the Discord they have an LFG-Steam you can utilize. As well as a Voice chat system to make parties with.


Hit & Miss

-Music: The music in the game for the most part stays true to the general feel of the universe. There are some parts that the music doesn't fit in with. Some combat sections your going to have your immersion broken by it. However this happens in maybe like 2 or 3 missions and they only happen in certain sections of those missions. Overall its not a huge impact but when you first have encounter it you and your friends on the first play through will laugh a bit and have a WTF moment. Aside from that the music accomplishes its goal.

-Enemy Health: Some enemies in the game. Specifically 2 have a bit more health than you will really feel should be necessary. It's not game breaking, but still worth noting. When you see them if you pick the game up you will know. With maybe 1 other that feels hit or miss from my personal opinion.

-Classes: There are a couple classes in the game that feel a bit lackluster at the moment but they are still worth playing to level up and unlocking the universal perks to play the classes you will enjoy more. Overall not a super negative impact but still worth mentioning. Doc and Technician specifically. Doc is the healer of the classes in the roster, but the main ability he has that makes him unique over the others does not perform very well in it's current state. As for the technician he gets a deploy-able turret that doesn't perform very well and has limited options to be worth taking into on the higher difficulties. If your playing him you will be using his shock traps more for the area slow so you can kill the enemies faster. However this is more my opinion on both these classes but if you play the game I suggest trying them for yourself to see if you feel different on the matter. There is a reason I put this under Hit & Miss.

-Game-play: If you are not a fan of the Aliens universe but are a fan of the hoard type games you will more than likely enjoy this game.

-Friendly Fire: While I have no issue with this I will list this here. Yes there is a friendly fire mechanic in the game. However you only encounter it on Intense and up. So make sure you communicate with your friends and players you party up with about your positioning.

Negatives

-Internet Connection: If you have less than stellar internet then your going to have a hard time finding people through its normal matchmaking system. It's Peer to Peer. As someone who has decent internet I have not had issues with this.

-AI: This game was NOT Designed around the friendly AI that you can play with. The Developers even said they did not make this game based around the single-player experience. You CAN play with them, but you will get less than stellar experience on higher difficulties with them.

-Higher Difficulties: There are two offending difficulties in particular. Extreme and Insane. These two difficulties slam the brick wall at you with Enemy Buffs and Player Nerf's. However the community has voiced its concern with this and the developers SEEM to be receptive on revisiting these two difficulties and re-balancing them.

-Game-play: If you are not a fan of the Alien universe and not a fan of hoard shooters then I do not recommend this game to you. Because it CAN get repetitive. At the end of the day this game is best experienced with Friends and other Players you can talk with over voice chat.

-Comms: There is NO in game voice chat, or chat system. You are encouraged to utilize the Community Discord for the LFG and Voice Chats, your own discords, or steam voice calls. If this is something that upsets you then you are not alone. There are many that have voiced... concerns. However I have had no issues finding ways to communicate.


Overall I find this game fun despite some of the problems. I still play it regularly. Is it worth the 40$? To me personally? I pre-ordered the deluxe edition and i'm still getting my worth out of it. But at the end of the day this review is to help you decide for yourself. So yes I recommend it. But if you do pick it up I will say that to get the full experience try more than one class. Many people get bored and complain there isn't enough to do when they played only one class. Maybe they have but didn't enjoy them. But at the end of the day when you level up the other classes you unlock universal perks and discover hidden perk from hidden chests on the mission maps. They will make a distinct difference in how the game is played. Like mentioned I have all classes leveled up and have collected everything from the maps. And most people I have played that isn't my usual group don't look for the intel or the hidden chests. So that really hurts them with getting weapons and attachments that drop from them and change how their weapons, and classes work. This game is about getting enjoyment overtime. I wouldn't call it grindy. But I will say this game is definitely a slow burn game that encourages you to replay levels to pick up those things from the chests. There is a fair amount of content in the game. You just have to look for it.

** update they did fix the AI queue problem, but now the game's just kinda dead. New survival mode is, well, just kinda awful, overall i want to like the game but wait for it on sale and do the campaign. You'll probably end up playing by yourself.

The same mission over and over with the only thing that changes is the placement of a hidden chest is a little daft to me.

Needs an option to sit in queue until the game fills with people instead of dropping in AI's at 20sec. I'd rather wait.