Played with friends.

It's wild how few of these Left 4 Dead-likes actually work, and Aliens doesn't quite make the cut of those that do.

There's four campaigns (one more if you buy some DLC) that are all pretty dull. They try to mix it up by adding killer synths and mutants from the Prometheus era of the franchise but they just feel underbaked in comparison to the xenomorphs. The missions all have far too similar objectives and they rarely feel different. The part where you shoot cooling rods to stop a ship from leaving was the most interesting the objectives ever got - they're almost all "stand here and fight a hundred waves for X amount of time"

It has the usual unique monster types, mindless guys that run at you, guys that explode, guy that spit acid at you for area denial, guys that jump on you and attack (i swear to fucking god every L4D clone has this guy), guys that...are really strong? The Xenomorph Drone is kind of a brawler with the ability to pin you and he runs away after a bit. The Warrior is...strong? There's a third big guy archetype for xenos but I literally cannot remembe anything about him.

The synths have the usual generic shootmans, guys with shields, guys with gun, guys with sniper rifle, etc. They have armor you have to wear away before you can actually do damage.

Mutants have like..three types. Suicide headcrabs, zombies, and an invisible cat monster that isn't fun to engage at any point.

Some of the cosmetics are rather worthless - a gun decal makes sense in an FPS where the gun is always visible - not so much in a TPS. Most cosmetics are ugly, I think they were going for realistic military guy shit but its boring and unappealing.

There's a mechanic where you slot perks into abilities to change their properties. That's pretty neat - the class I used had rockets as their main ability and using perks to make them into napalm launchers was fun.

The one thing it does to differentiate itself from other L4D types is the challenge card system, which is about the one unique thing about it I genuinely enjoyed. Each player can pick a card which is usually a horrible debuff that will fuck you over but you get increased rewards. The game chooses from the cards selected, and this modifier lasts throuhgougt the mission. Some are cancer (pistol only) some sounded bad but were ultimately nothingburgers (the pursuing synth one sounded scary but he literally stopped spawning after a couple times).

I don't expect much from writing in these but it fails to deliver there too. While L4D and Vermintide know what to do (focus on character banter), this decides to have a really dull story about marines and Weyland-Yutani and the xenomorphs and zzzzzzz......

The marines you play are personalityless ciphers and the dialogue is all over radio. The radio dialogue is written like a copy of a copy of Aliens, all meathead no substance. Cameron's marines were meatheads and not terribly deep but he knows what he's doing and how to play into and out of cliche. This is all cliche, all meathead. There's nothing remotely engaging or surprising there. If you look at the fact Weyland-Yutani is involved in the plot and the X-Files black goo is involved too .... you already know what's happening, what will happen, etc.

Some'a the music wasn't bad, I liked the guy on flute going ham during the jungle mission.

On discount with friends, sure. Otherwise pass, especially if you have L4D or Vermintide unless the Aliens branding makes you go feral