I liked it, but I'm not happy about it. It's far and away the best licensed game that lets you do anything involving the Colonial Marines, but that's a low bar, and there's technical issues, bad writing, and repetitive gameplay to contend with.

To elaborate- it really captures the atmosphere and aesthetic, and I think the mechanics are well-chosen to do so. It's sort of a stealth RTS with the walking simulator aspects of a CRPG, like a milsimmier Shadow Tactics- you generally don't want to take direct fights and you want to whack 'em with turrets and sniper rifles over the direct engagements. The thing that makes it into a horror game are the resource-management aspects- turrets are a resource, as are the items you use to interact with doors to weld them shut and keep bad guys out (or hack into some optional computers later), as are the items you use to heal your dudes' physical and mental (more on that in a second) health.

A lot of comparisons to XCOM were drawn at launch due to the very similar squad loadout screen, but I'd argue it's got more in line with Darkest Dungeon- you walk around and occasionally do things, and the longer you walk around, the worse things get, as your troops have a panic bar that makes them worse at things as it gets higher, and gives them specifically named mental health issues that provide mechanical debuffs to your squad (and don't have any other noticeable effect). On launch when I played, this was supplemented by a campaign-wide death clock (no, really, I swear it's not XCOM babe pls let me explain) on later missions that meant you only had so much time to do the things, so one was incentivized to Persona 5 it and do as much of a mission/dungeon as one could in a single go. Apparently this can now be optionally removed by popular request, if you find the game mechanics in and of themselves sufficiently difficult and stressful.

Where it lost my vote of full confidence was the writing- while it brought back a bunch of the old canon (pre-Prometheus, hate Prometheus), the consequences of that for how it went from feeling like a hellish nightmare of a bug-hunt to a more stock action movie inverted the Aliens curve which the game is so clearly leaning on. The plot is also pretty much lifted directly from Aliens with a couple alterations, which I don't hate, but can understand feeling negatively about. Unit barks are also a little repetitive, especially when you're doing a long run across a map.

For me it was an 8/10 and I don't regret a second. If you liked the Aliens vibes, I'd give it a shot, possibly even at full-price if you're some idiot superfan like me, and if you didn't but want to experience some interesting mechanical choices first-hand, I'd still get it on sale, but it's not nearly as enthusiastic a recommendation.

In middle school, there was this console called the Nintendo Wii. It had this gem of a title on it called "Blazing Angels: Squadrons of World War II". I loved that game, although I was terrible at it and couldn't get past Dunkirk without resorting to cheat codes. I revisited it when I was with my parents over the winter holiday, and it didn't age particularly well.

Launching Ace Combat 7 for the first time rekindled those feelings of prepubescent joy in a way that very few things have these last several months.

There's better reviews from people with greater technical understanding of flight arcade games, but I would be remiss in not making sure I recommend this game to anyone out there who just wants to be an incredibly talented one-man air-supremacy-holder ace fighter pilot for a half an hour at a time.