While not the total disaster some would say, it still ain't good.
Of course I read the GS review before actually starting to play it and I thought, uh-oh. There went fifty bucks.
But having spent that fifty I was determined to give the game a shot. Unfortunately, GS was fairly accurate in their review. The game is mostly - boring and uninspired.
But it's not the 4.5 that GS gave it. I'd rate it a 6, because the game does pick up a little bit once you get down to LV-426. It picks up just enough Aliens vibe to save it from being an unmitigated disaster.
They throw in a weapon augmentation system which is kind of cool - it feels good to add different upgrades onto your guns and they do make a difference in game play which is always welcome (although I spent the first two missions running around with shotguns only because I couldn't figure out how to change weapons and just figured the game was so bad that it wouldn't let you. :-P
You also can look for recordings and dog-tags and Legendary Weapons for extra back story and XP to speed up your arsenal upgrades. But for me this part of the game actually came off... wrong. You're in the middle of Hadley's Hope or wherever with Xeno's coming out of the walls at any moment, but you're stopping to investigate every corner and crevice for dog-tags, recordings, and legendary weapons. There are times where your AI Squad mates are yelling at you to get something done in a life or death situation, but you don't want to because you have to search the area for dog tags, recordings, and legendary weapons. It just doesn't fit at all with the '40 miles of hard road' tone of the whole Aliens franchise. At the end of the game I only found two legendaries so they are clearly off the beaten path, but whatever - it's not like I'm _ever_ going to go back to play it again to try and find anything I missed.
The last thing that A:CM gets mostly wrong is movement. I found myself constantly getting hung up on the environment, although now that I stop to think about it, that certainly did lend a large amount of tenseness to several of the fights. Somehow though I don't think this was intentional and there are much better ways of pulling off tenseness than crappy collision detection.
If you haven't bought it yet, don't bother. If you have, apologies, but it is possible to get about $20 worth of enjoyment out of your $50...