Horrific in All the Wrong Ways
HIGH The touchdown on LV426 is adequately realized.
LOW Everything else.
WTF They released this colossal pile of dross at full price?
It's a canonical sequel to the films, or so they say.
This would be a little easier to swallow if Aliens: Colonial Marines
The plot, such as it is, involves a fresh batch of "spacefaring" troops jetting off to uncover what happened to the first batch of unfortunates sent to LV426 as depicted in the movie Aliens. Will they avoid the dire fate of the first group? Will they? Of course they won't, though it would have been better for all concerned if they had.
The Trainwreck Express wastes no time getting underway on its journey to Bad Time City—Colonial Marines looks absolutely hideous from the get go. Character animations are jerky and lifeless, and textures range from "barely acceptable" to blurry, poorly defined messes. Objects are roughly rendered and suffer from blocky artifacts along their edges. Aliens skulking under catwalks might be more unsettling if their bodies didn't clip through the environments to reveal their positions. While there was an effort to provide decent atmospheric battlegrounds, the implementation is utterly incompetent due to technical deficiencies like these cropping up all over the place.
The gameplay itself would be mind numbingly routine—at best—if enemies had an acceptable level of artificial intelligence. They don't.
The iconic Xenomorphs are ridiculously predictable, often charging straight at their prey from a distance. Worse, any sense of menace the aliens pose is completely nullified by non-player characters (NPCs) routinely getting into drunken bouts of fisticuffs with them before ambling out largely unscathed.
The aliens aren't the only example of bad AI. Enemy mercenaries decide seemingly at random whether to camp behind cover for months on end or to cheerfully run into a hail of bullets in a suicidal attempt to take the player down. It's also possible to be killed from enemies firing through cover from impossible trajectories. In one example, an enemy merc in an area I'd supposedly cleared shoved his head through a solid wall in order to unload into my back. I was squatting in what I'd assumed was a safe position. He sure showed me.
The titular Colonial Marines are another gross misstep. It's nearly impossible to describe just how silly and pointless these weird homunculus automatons are without seeing them in action. During cut-scenes their dead eyes swivel across the landscape with all the intelligence and expression of shop window mannequins. In battle they jerkily hobble across environments, often holding extended gunfights with their opponents at point blank range while still somehow managing to miss every shot until the player gets involved.
The script doesn't cover these bumbling cretins in glory either. When one marine—sorry, one BADASS COLONIAL MARINE—wakes up from Cryosleep with a deceased facehugger tickling her tonsils, her immediate reaction is to completely shrug it off when recounting the event to her companions because… well, because she's monumentally thick. There's no other explanation.
Furthermore, the developers would have gotten more convincing voiceovers from a budget text-to-speech program than from the actors they hired—emotionally resonant performances are nowhere to be seen, and the overall experience would be exponentially improved by getting rid of any idiot with even a single line of dialogue in the game. I'm absolutely serious—any time the game threatens to build an ounce of tension, one of these bastards stumbles in and destroys it with an atrocious performance.
Let's not forget that misery loves company. The game's been designed with co-op in mind, so coal-hearted misanthropics who despise others can invite them into their game to suffer through these countless atrocities together. Then there's the versus modes, where players can slip into the sleek black exoskeletons of the aliens and while away the time getting stuck on bits of terrain or encountering severe camera issues while trying to scale catwalks.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. The Smart Gun's a pretty neat weapon that atomizes everything within range effortlessly. The campaign is also mercifully short at around a four to five hour running length on normal.
…And that's it.
That's all I could come up with for compliments, short of reaching for praise like "probably won't melt your console" or "might not be radioactive." Even the most hardcore Aliens fan alive would find more enjoyment in any other first person shooter on the market, so to reward Gearbox for gleefully pissing into the eyes of said fanbase by purchasing or even playing this game would be a crime against humanity.
This is the part where I should probably reference the movie with a stinging comment about how it's "Game over, man" or how it should be nuked from orbit. I'm not that witty, but I am pretty vulgar—as a result, all I can say is that if Aliens: Colonial Marines
Ah well. It's still better than Prometheus.
Disclosures: This game was obtained via rental and reviewed on the Xbox 360. Approximately seven hours of play was devoted to single-player modes (completed 1 times) and two hours of play in multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains blood and gore, intense violence and strong language. Sadly, the ESRB does not warn of the harrowing sense of loss of their own precious life experienced by all who play this game.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing: Environmental effects provide audio clues as to enemy positioning or what passes for tactics in this game. Subtitles are available for anyone who wishes to read what the idiots in this game have to say.
The chance discovery of a muddy, burnt out copy of '50 Shades of Grey' in a hunting pit gave him an appreciation for complex plots, characters and overarching narrative, and the unexpected gift of a Spectrum 48k allowed him to indulge in these newfound sensibilities with intelligent, highbrow games such as 'flee from the badly animated spinning turquoise dolphins' or 'avoid the deadly glowing bricks of doom'.
The fusion of both these interests finally culminated with Darren teaching himself how to write by basically guessing at what words might look like when jotted down on paper as opposed to being howled inarticulately at the skies.
Now others occasionally get to read his scribblings. Lucky them.
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Darren Forman? who is this guy? Get him on the podcast! I was in stitches reading this review
“any time the game threatens to build an ounce of tension, one of these bastards stumbles in and destroys it with an atrocious performance.”
Actually wow! im still laughing now
I know that you guys gave it a 2.0 but I think that is too high. The game is buggy, has average to poor graphics and looks nothing like the “demo” that Pitchford and Gearbox were selling us before its launch. What I find crazy is that it still sold well, not great but well. Even with a low metacritic score it seems people bought it sight unseen.
Hey Craig, thanks for the comment. Personally, I’d have loved to be able to say that Colonial Marines was a great game. Many releases from last year, such as Binary Domain and Dragon’s Dogma, were superb games that didn’t do as well as I felt they should have critically speaking – but this game isn’t a misunderstood gem by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a barely functional cash-in engineered to prey on people’s fondness for the Alien franchise. And it worked. When genuinely brilliant games struggle to make a dime through lacklustre mainstream sales, seeing garbage like this succeed… Read more »
Was hoping that this would be only other non-EGM review to heap praise on Colonial Marines, unfortunately, it was not meant to be.
Randy Pitchford needs to be flogged. There is no excuse for how this game was sold early in its development and how it finally turned out. Sega was deceived, the press was deceived and we the consumers were deceived. There is no defense for that.His nice guy persona belies a soulless business man. He wanted money to let him make Borderlands and Sega’s Aliens money was just what he needed.