I had given up on this game, and the Deluxe Boxed Set took a long time to arrive. This game is huge, raking in 1.5 million in pledges and then taking three years to finally ship. I am happy to have it in my hands, and I congratulate the team for pushing through a mammoth project with a lot of custom parts (the boxes are excellent).
What is it?
Ambitious is one.
Simplified and well-play-tested is another.
And ultra-deluxe for the large boxed set. They really went all out with a gold-embossed box with heavy cardboard. This is not a cheap boxed set; it is premium quality.
It feels like a genuine "Mork Borg in space" is my final feeling.
Unlike Alien, this is all sci-fi horror. It is also a d100 roll-under system greatly simplified from the original Mothership 0e edition. Like Alien, it has hard-sci-fi roots but includes many others, like the original "inspirations" bingo card from the Kickstarter. So this covers anything from xenomorphs to demons, killer robots, invasions from Hell, and many other movies where the monster is a metaphor for something terrible we do to ourselves but is put into a monster form for easier digestion.
You could easily toss many Roger Corman movies, Starship Troopers, Outland, and The Exorcist movies on that card. The Abyss and its horror movie knock-offs, like Leviathan and the Deep Blue Sea movie, are other thoughts. The Blair Witch Project would be another, the movie Species, and maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Even sci-fi horror gems like Them or any swarm monster movie with giant insects would work well here, too. Zombies of any type would fit right in.
They have abandoned character improvement, preferring a story-based improvement system where if you survive, your character "ranks up" and gains more importance and stature in whatever universe you are playing in, thus being afforded more resources and power. You saw this between the first and second Alien movies, where Ripley went from "another crewmember" to "expert on xenomorphs." If the third Alien movie had followed this formula, she would have been a character in Burke's position in the third movie, which would have been a fantastic character arc.
Does it do Alien well? It could. Are Cepheus Engine and Hostile more complete games? Yes, but not laser-focused on horror like this game.
The one thing I love here is this is not all an Alien movie clone. You get some indie sci-fi horror games, and all they copy is Alien and that is it. We have all types of horror here, and you could throw in some elder gods from Cthulhu and their cults and still be on target.
A strong recommend here, and my faith in this game has been restored with an excellent boxed set.
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