This game is incredible.
Let me open by saying I've seen mostly positive reviews of this game and its current cinematic scenarios (Hope's Last Day, Chariot of the Gods, and Destroyer of Worlds), but I have seen quite a few that criticize it for some recurring reasons. Now, I saw all of these reasons prior to playing, so I was looking out for the issues other GMs said they ran into. Only, I didn't run into a single one of those issues.
Addressing the Criticisms
First off, the game is SLICK. Everything seems streamlined and built for speed and ease of play, assuming the GM has read the rules thoroughly and has things easily referenceable. I saw several people who complained about having to bounce between page 100 and 300 to run HLH, and they even went so far as to say the PDF made this even more difficult. Not sure why, as the PDF has a table of contents, which lets you rapidly jump from one section to another. And you can open multiple instances of the same PDF if you really would rather alt-tab. Now, I ran Hope's Last Day as my first go, and we did so on Roll20. I used the roll20 sheet for hostiles and created one for each type of xeno in the scenario, and I kept these and the character sheets open in their own windows so I could quickly alt-tab between them. I also had the physical GM screen standing open beside me on the desk, and I had two instances of the PDF open, one to combat and the other to stress and panic rules. I also read the rules sections and the HLH scenario all the way through, twice. To all the GMs out there: preparation is your friend, and it is a HUGE part of your job. You can't blame the system if you are unprepared. This is true no matter what RPG you're playing. But as for this game, Free League did an amazing job at keeping rules simple and consistent.
The second major complain I saw was people who said the stress and panic rules "get out of hand fast." This was not my experience. Yes, stress ratcheted up quickly, but... I'll make wo points as to why I don't feel it got out of hand, even when the players hit 7 stress after traversing a handful of zones. 1.) The players were smart enough to barricade themselves in a room at that point (without me needing to say anything), and they took a breather for two turns. 2.) As the GM, I know its my job to pace things, and I understood when to let a simple organic fear of the environment affect the players rather than the characters; this game assumes you aren't going to constantly bombard the PCs with threat after threat after threat after threat, etc ... You need to feel out the pace and let the players breathe. It's literally right there in the book, if you read it through. These words aren't a criticism of other GMs and players; this is me offering advice through my own example, and I'm telling you, if you give this game a chance to run the way it's intended, you will have a BLAST.
My Experience and Review
What Free League has pulled off is so astounding to me ... I mean, a game of sci-fi survival horror, set in the Alien universe, and the star of the show (no offense to the xenos) was the human interaction that Agenda's bring out. Holy crap! My PCs actually lived through the HLH scenario up until the shuttle. Xenos chasing them onto the launch pad, PCs opening the shuttle doo, my NPC getting facehugged, the PCs fighting off the remaining facehuggers, shutting the shuttle doors and take off ... only to have the WY agent turn off the safety alarms, set the shuttle to decompress in 30 seconds, then went to the back of the shuttle and put on a compression suit (citing a need to check some engine malfunction). Soo, there were a couple more rolls, but the end of it all was the WY agent living and everyone else getting vented into the upper atmosphere as the shuttle left them all behind. This sort of thing just wouldn't happen like this without the agendas. Absolutely brilliant, Free League.
As for the rest of it. I found all the systems fit together perfectly. Stress and Panic fed the fear the occasional xenos inspired. Combats were short and vicious. It was as it was intended: Cinematic and dramatic survival horror.
I haven't had this much fun with a new system in a VERY long time, and I've played buttload of systems in my 36 years of TT RPGing.
So, thank you, Free League. Sincerely. You've given us all a stellar game. And the nay-sayers? They're just wrong.
