It seems apparent what they were trying to accomplish; it just fell short.
Those similarities seemed fitting as it appeared the developers tried to bring forward a movie-like feeling to the game. This I based on a few elements. First, the voice cast; there are some professional, albeit B-list, actors lending their voice to the game, including Lance Henriksen, and Michael Ironside. At the same time, the developers didn't do a lot to the voices when it came to the alien characters. They just threw the regular actor's voice over top, and it made the aliens feel fake. I mean, throw some distortion, a flange, chorus, or pitch effects in there to attempt to make it sound like they're from another planet. Instead, when this giant flat-headed side-way-mouth talking being starts talking, it's just Cpt Jane Way from Star Trek Voyager.
There are also a lot of cut scenes in the game; too many for my liking, and some were completely unnecessary. I couldn't climb one ladder on my own. Every ladder I came up to deserved it's own mini cut scene to show me going up or down. I presume this was to help with the whole "It's like a movie" feeling they were going for, since movies spend a lot of their time with the camera in front of the key actor for that scene, and not behind them, but it just broke the flow of the game-play more than anything.
Another annoyance is that you can skip some of the cut scenes, yet others you can't. I couldn't find any specific rhyme or reason as two why this was the case. I surely don't understand why some checkpoints were put before a cut scene you can't skip. This gets annoying when you get killed and have to watch the whole scene over a second, or maybe even a 3rd time around. Again, it interrupts the flow of the game-play.
Continuing the movie theme, they tried to tack on some exciting music during the more high energy action scenes. Usually movies of this nature would have a choice: original score (either electronic or orchestral in nature) or licensed music (usually reliant on a lot of guitar). They went with the rock music, which I believe was all Breaking Benjiman, and it felt quite out of place with the rest of game. I would have preferred to have heard the orchestra brought in.
The game-play itself was okay; it follows in klassic 3rd-person-shooter fashion and the action can get intense from time to time, but it lacked a creative force to keep it fresh until the end. Despite the title of the game, you don't spend a lot of time running from the creatures you face off against. Of course running would be counter-productive anyway since most of the aliens are faster than you, and would surely track you down and kill you. Instead you spend most of your time with your lock-on active, walking slowly backwards, and shooting like Hell; I suppose WSLASLH wouldn't make a very catchy title though. Many of the weapons prove useless though, as your default weapon and one other energy weapon come out about as powerful as any of the other ones in your inventory once they start reaching their max upgrade level. You can upgrade your weapons power by using weapon mods, and they're fairly easy to find if you take the time to search every room, locker, chest and dead body you come across on the station. Because the two main weapons have unlimited ammo, with just a few seconds needed to reload or recharge them, it makes for a another reason why the other weapons aren't overly helpful since the munition supply for them are finite and not plentiful. At the end of each of the 7 chapters in the the you'll come across a boss fight (with the exception of Chapter 1). Boss battles throw a little variety in terms of the game-play technique, but for the most part the change in approach is mild in how to take them out.
When you're not shooting everything in sight you'll also be finding yourself taking part in solving a few basic switch puzzles or going on fetch quests that don't add much to the game. Usually the latter consists of trying every door down a long hallway of doors trying to find a pass card or parts of a password to open a door. Sometimes it's so silly, like when you can find the pass card to a door on a body just a few meters away. Just leave the door unlocked in that case. You may also have to find items to combine them together, much like point & click adventure games of the past. One example is finding a circuit board and wires which you use together to activate a bridge. Overall the need to do this searching adds elements that are more tedious than fun.
Somewhat like the game-play, the atmosphere is at first welcome and befitting. Creepy, dark, blood stained corridors with both human and aliens remains littering the halls. Because the game takes place on a space station, these halls and rooms and scenic touches also get reused and repeated until a desensitization takes place. Eventually it just gets boring to look at.
There were some minor irritants that made appearances as well. Normally these little things wouldn't be worth mentioning to me, but considering what I felt was a mediocre execution of the other elements which seemed to try so hard to make this feel like a movie experience, these things often took all of that feeling away making them much more obvious. These included people calling me into rooms when they are not there but appear when the cut scene starts, guns resetting to the top priority weapon after every little cut scene so that just before a fight I don't have the gun I want in hand, voices out of sync with the character's lips, a camera that's hard to control and often keeps your enemies off screen (thank goodness for the lock on feature) and one time this energy field on the floor that was suppose to be flickering so you time a walk across it just stayed on and I had to reload my game.
The game was engaging enough for me to want to see through it until the end. The controls were adequate, the action was plentiful (although repetitive), and the weapon management system was kind of fun. There's lots of potential in this title, it just doesn't seem like they allowed it to come through. It felt like they had 5 different game designers on the project that all had a different end goal in mind, and they never told each other. This made it hard for all the components to mix seamlessly or for any one component to reach excellence. All the right ingredients are there for a great title, they just needed a better chef.