YMMV / Aliens: Dark Descent

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Expect to see Sergeant, Recon, and Gunner in most players' squads. Sergeant are crucial for Stress control and providing extra Command Points which can be use for combat or dropping Mines and Trackers. Recons are the best at stealth thanks to their silenced snipers rifles that can take down patrolling Xenomorphs. Finally, Gunners are the best combat class thanks to their high-DPS Smart Guns and the ability to suppress enemies even further with High-Impact Rounds, making them ideal for boss fights and defense phases.
• Demonic Spiders: Eggs! They don't show up on the motion tracker and they release facehuggers that can instantly take out one of your Marines. Even worse, destroying them will alert the hive to your presence unless you have a Recon class with a M42A3 Rifle and the Silencer skill.^note Though if you can take all of them out at once with a Herd-Hitting Attack, that works too.
• Game-Breaker: When it comes to any kind of defense objective you have time to prepare for, Mines can’t be beat, simply due to you effectively having unlimited amounts of them and the fact Xenomorphs rarely patrol objective areas. Since they only require the regenerating CP to use, a patient player can eventually place down more guaranteed-kill mines than the number of Xenomorphs that will attack them, trivializing most objective defenses.
• Goddamn Bats: Overlapping with Demonic Spiders above, the xenomorph eggs. If you know where they are, you can take your time dealing with them. They're not very tough and can be destroyed easily. However, if the damage done to them isn't sufficient to take out an egg in the first hit, the facehugger will have time to get out, alerting the Hive. Furthermore, eggs typically come in groups, some of which are clustered together and others of which are spread out in a room. Destroying any one of these eggs will typically cause all the other eggs nearby to deploy their facehuggers, also alerting the Hive. This means that the only way to destroy eggs without causing an alert is either judicious use of a silenced weapon (requiring many command points to take out several,) hitting them all at once with enough damage (which isn't always possible,) or using a recon drone's distraction ability to open the eggs from outside the room and lure them into the firing arc of Sentry Guns.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The reviewer general consensus is that, while it is not a flawless game, it is one that carries a whole lot of love for the franchise, uses its atmosphere masterfully, and details such as the stress mechanics help sell the horror angle of the series.
• Scrappy Mechanic: If a marine takes any damage at all, even if the attack just hit their armor, and even if you healed it immediately, they will end up in the medbay for an extended period of time. This regularly results in apparently healthy marines spending the next 10 days laid up in medical, which - in a game with a constantly ticking doomsday clock - can end an entire campaign for what feels like a very unfair reason. And that's not even counting the various psychological issues these marines might've picked up along the way, which need to be treated separately over a couple of days.
• That One Level
  • Montero. You have to not only face against the Xenomorphs, but also hordes of Guardians. The sheer number of Guardians means that you can't snipe all of them, and if you engage them in combat, the gunfire noise will attract the Xenomorphs, and within the level's tight quarters that means you're often trapped in a brutal pincer attack.
  • Olduvai. It's a long and exhausting mission, which can be even worse if the doom clock is ticking low. It also has a section where the motion tracker is disabled, leaving you vulnerable for a Xenomorph ambush.