so did the nightmare just smash y'all as soon as the area loaded? I need to give it more attempts but seems like a cheap start and intro to the enemy

a big enemy

The Nightmare

There's a mission January gives you to stop The Nightmare

You have to get the satellite part from Hardware Labs, which I have, but the mission hasn't triggered yet. I've quite easily defeated each Nightmare i've come across but they're annoying.

there's a bit about 2/3rds of the way in - where you have to hit 6 switches in a particular order to reset the power.  After that there was a really lengthy section that involved revisiting old areas, but now there were repopulated, with a bunch of enemies or the stairs were destroyed.  Really felt like a bit of a slog to me!  didn't help that I thought the game was ending at that point, and it just went on and on.  I did enjoy the game again towards the end, though

both the beginning and end fake outs really left a great impression and i think will be very memorable, they did a great job with that, given the old alien infested space station story isn't exactly new ground.  And every character in the game ringing you up to talk every 30 seconds.  Maybe it helped that I fully intended the nuke it from space option, but ended up saving everyone possible and trying to do the right thing, so the alien empathy reprograming trick made real sense in my play.   

By the way I only heard that the beginning was fantastic but hadn't heard why.  Gosh that was good, in fact I replayed it straight away just to get a closer look at it!

Loved the 'cook' quest as well, making you jump through the ringer like you'd see in a fairly substandard side quest, but it turns out he just didn't want you in his kitchen, what with him being an evil killer and all.  Really should have just shot him in the head when he let me in!

I didn't use any of the alien power ups so I probably didn't play in the most exciting way (especially reading back through this thread; it's great reading back, even if most of my thoughts are 'why didn't i think of that!') so I thought the game was at it's best when i just had a handful of ammo and was in a big room, hiding from a phantom and presumable a couple of mimics, trying to figure out how to get through a locked door.  Worst part of how I played was if I had a couple of turrets, backtracking to position them so they were always covering me.  It was effective but pretty tedious way to play.