I was gifted a copy for Christmas. Here are my thoughts about the game and it's state a full year after the original release:

• The Alien universe is depicted in autistic detail, this game is probably second only to Alien: Isolation in terms of getting the canon in order and sorting out the wheat from the chaff. The absolute love for Aliens pours out from everything in the game. Story is serviceable and convincing and I believe a co-op shooter doesn't require more than that). It's downright shocking to me how successfully this title can blend the Prometheus storyline into the canon while at the same time keeping the original Alien film's aesthetic and full compatibility with the recent ALIEN tabletop roleplaying game from Free League (which I highly recommend).
  
  
• Strong gun porn with dozens of weapons to unlock, buy, level up, modify, and pimp out with cringe skins. Every one of them has a full page of background about how this particular weapon model came into existence, a literal lore feast for nerds. They also all feel different - from what I've seen there is no copy and paste here. All of them are very clearly described in numerical stats too, so you will know exactly what the weapon is like on paper before you choose to invest in it.
  
  
• Really good gunplay - the game controls as it should and doesn't leave much to chance or guess work. Only things that matter are the numbers and skill.
  
  
• Deep customization of loadouts, with 7 classes to choose from, combining perks and weapon modifications, allowing the players to make various interesting builds to fit their playstyle.
  
  
• Absolutely no microtransactions with an impact to gameplay, no weapon or class locked behind a paywall, no pay to win. This should go without saying, it should be the only acceptable way to go about it, but, as you know, it's the current year, so this is a plus in my book.
  
  
• Adequate visual presentation, the game looks nice and runs good and even the maps are surprisingly pretty, even if somewhat lacking in visual variety. I believe this is forgivable simply due to the setting and it's restrictions. The game can be described as having 5 distinct environment types, one of which is in the expansion DLC.
  
  
• Amazing soundtrack filled with musical quotes from other titles in the IP.
  
  
• Fantastic sound effects, everything sounds exactly as you would imagine it should. Weapons, enemies and environments have high quality, distinctive, atmospheric, immersive sounds.
  
  
• Good enemy variety, with ~26 enemy types (~30 with the expansion), depending on how you count. They belong to 3 enemy factions which will also fight each other during some missions.
  
  
• Good voice acting delivery.
  
  
• Significant amount of cosmetic unlocks.
  
  
• Some free content updates are being provided over time.

With such an impressive list of things done really well, why would I not recommend this title? Well, the negatives aren't many, but they are strong.

• Awful net code. There is no other way about it - in a title mainly focused on online co-op, this should take first place. Everything else comes secondary in terms of the impact on the level of player enjoyment. This game will constantly challenge your patience with desynchronization. This makes enemies and bodies disappear, players float and teleport around the map, kills being "stolen", inaccurate tally of actions for various achievements and challenges, etc., not to mention it will cause disconnects and remove players from your Fireteam mid mission, without warning. The list of things which go wrong solely because of the game's inadequate communication between players is long, but there is a single issue here that is more egregious than anything else:
  
  Players cannot reconnect to active sessions. That's right - if you get disconnected, the only thing you can do is wait for your friends to finish the mission by themselves, while your character is replaced by a bot and your chance for rewards is forfeit. In a game like this, it is simply unacceptable. And this happens every third game for me, so for now I uninstalled and let's see in a year. Currently there's little point in playing for me.
  
  
• Bots are useless, so playing alone is not really an option. It is possible to play through the base campaign on the lowest difficulty setting without other players, though it's not easy and it's not an option for the DLC expansion.
  
  
• Glitches galore, especially concerning enemy behavior. For example the latest patch made the aliens constantly get stuck on walls. I would expect further patches to break the game in new and exciting ways.
  
  
• The game quickly becomes extremely repetitive. There are only 12 missions in the base game and 3 with the expansion. Each takes 20 to 40 minutes on the easier difficulty levels, so I'd say the first full playthrough of the base game will take about 6 hours.
  
  After that, it becomes apparent how the devs tried to pad the experience. Each mission has a "hidden cache" with loot, placed in a random spot on the map, enticing players to fully explore every time, which is the opposite of exciting.
  
  Progression is very slow and that doesn't help at all - it's a hard grind, with lots of options for failure and therefore losing progress. Without reading about all the locked perks and parts one might not even understand what are the strengths of a particular class or weapon, because at the beginning everything feels extremely weak and it's a very slow, gradual process to build up to higher difficulties.
  
  Devs tried to shake things up a little by introducing challenge cards (essentially mission mutators, some of which reward completion) and daily/weekly challenges, but the result is that these are an absolute must if you want to progress, not simply an option, even if you don't find them fun. Objectives like "finish mission X while doing cartwheels backwards" or "kill 400 bugs" are really nothing to write home about or get inspired by. The "I just log in for the daily" syndrome is strong with this one. This way the game makes it more profitable to some extent to keep running early/easy missions over and over instead of rewarding players for challenging themselves.
  
  I think the progression should be at least twice as fast to be motivating - I already played this for 30 hours, with a significant chunk of it spent on menu diving between runs and I don't feel ready to switch to the 3rd out of 5 difficulty levels. On top of that there are achievements requiring players to max out experience with all classes or 30 weapons and such (which was all of them on launch), disincentivizing sticking to a favorite playstyle.
  
  
• Staff Sgt. Herrera's lines are turbo cringe, absolutely overdone Hispanic stereotypes. "Pendejos" and "mierdas" non-stop, interspersed with even more cringe. Calling deadly Xenos "spicy nuggets" by a mission coordinator / game narrator is completely immersion breaking. Just because the Aliens film had the iconic Vasquez in it doesn't mean every release in the franchise needs to have an obligatory token Hispanic character that feels copied from Narcos: Mexico. If anything, this game made me even more racist than I already was.
  
  
• In the In the grimdarkness of AD 2202, there is no biological sex and gender is over. There are only "masculine" and "feminine" body types.

As a man of culture, I played all of Lil Hentai Games and enjoyed them thoroughly. I only bought this because I assumed it will be more of the same. Oh, how wrong I was.

Where do I even begin?

The art (and especially how it's animated) is... Very pretty, but at the same time nothing to write home about. In this entry it has a strong AI-generated vibe, though and it's certainly nothing special. It's very repetitive, because the girls' poses rarely change, it's usually just their outfits or lack of them.

That's it. That's all I can say semi-positively about this. Apart from the visuals, there's literally nothing good.

The music sounds AI-generated too. It's one of the most generic and boring pieces of muzak I ever heard. It's better to just play some lo-fi beats to sleep/study to in the background.

The UI is glitchy jank.

The casual puzzle gameplay from previous entries is gone. Now you just click through dialog.
That would be OK, but there are also RPG-style TESTS to pass if you want to impress the girl in a certain way. To pass, you throw a 20-sided die, as in D&D. If the die's result combined with your perks is at least as high as the test's difficulty, you pass. Talking to girls gives you experience with causes you to level up and unlock perks which can raise your chances in 4 "attributes" for the purpose of these tests. This whole mechanic is just a huge waste of time and effort and brings literally nothing of value.

To pad the game's content, there are cards to collect. You get cards when you reach a specific point or outcome in a conversation. Most often these are connected to certain tests and their results. So, if you want all the cards for a certain girl, you need to replay all of their conversations, without any skip feature, attempt different tests than before, and succeed/fail as needed. Fortunately the cards give you a strong hint on how to get them, but it doesn't help the overall game and ultimately doesn't bring anything of value either.

The example of an end-game loop looks like this:

1. Click to load conversation
   
2. Click 20 times, but not too fast, to get to a choice
   
3. Select a test of difficulty 5 that you need to fail
   
4. Roll a natural 20
   
5. Click 30 times, but not too fast, to end conversation
   
6. Click the button to restart conversation, which is not possible without doing all the above steps first
   
7. GOTO 1

And you will have to repeat this over and over for up to 20 minutes per easy test you want to fail, because the dice rolls in this game are broken. How can you fail so hard to program a simple dice roll? How on Earth is that possible? A difficulty of 5 should mean that you will fail 25% of the time. It should be astronomically unlikely to pass 20 times in a row. Yet, here we are.

And this could all have been fine for me, because I was a fan once. But the writing also went downhill. It used to be that the girls in this series had cute personalities. Their dialogues were short, but fun. Psychologically believable, let's say. Especially with each sequel, when it was already established that these girls were FWBs with the main character named after you, the player. They sounded like girls who seem fun to be around and they spoke things that people do say to each other in real life. I actually 100% these previous games just to see all the dialogue. Because it was fun.

Now? Well, now every girl addresses you as anon IRL (every girl pronouncing it differently). Why??? What kind of pron-brained redditor might have thought this to be a good idea? The dialogues are much longer and complete cringe. Instead of just flirting with each other in a manner not requiring suspension of disbelief, the characters somehow regurgitate sentence after sentence of complete and utter meaninglessness that is difficult to bear. They literally talk about nothing "Ooooh I like the place, so cool!", "Oh did you know ninja were created in the XVI century? So interesting.", "Wow, anon! Your knowledge is so impressive! I like you so much!".

Worse still, the girls now have full voice over. Half of them sound flat and boring, reading every single sentence in the same way, like a machine. Yet, it's not Text-to-Speech. I'm not sure that's a good thing, because these are the better half. The other half sound like some mass-produced Chinese V-Tuber. Like the fuggin pine pepsi woman on DikKok. Or like Maangchi. It's full-frontal cringe with engrish pronounciation and a thick East-Asian accent. It's not sexy at all.

This game should have profile features disabled, because, unfortunately, unlike the previous games in this series, it is blatant shovelware that you can 100% in under 2 hours ez and refund. Unless you want to farm the cards too.