Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, told us all that he loves Aliens. He has repeatedly spoken about the time he sat down with Ridley Scott and talked about the franchise, and he insists that Aliens: Colonial Marines is canon. Pitchford wouldn’t lie to us… Aliens: Colonial Marines wouldn’t let us down and neither would Gearbox Software… Right?
Aliens: Colonial Marines does show an eye for detail. From Bishop’s dismembered legs to Newt’s doll, to the big guy from Prometheus, it was all there. Gearbox clearly did their homework on the franchise as far as references could go. They assumed they knew what we would want in an Aliens game… Unfortunately, like Newt’s doll’s head, this game is majorly lacking in substance and full of stagnant air.
In the 1999 PC game Aliens Vs. Predator, the marines looked like marines, the xenomorphs looked like xenomorphs, and the planet looked like LV-426. The game was overflowing with beautiful textures (for the time) and interesting gameplay mechanics. I felt terrified when being stalked by a vicious alien through the desolate halls of an abandoned complex. My motion tracker was beeping furiously as swarms of xenos descended upon me to feast on my succulent marine flesh. That was fourteen years ago and I was twelve years old. Now, in 2013, we Aliens fans have been served a hot plate of shit and the dream for a tense, interesting, and exciting Aliens game has been fully trounced upon.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is the biggest disappointment I have experienced in video games in all my years of playing. The franchise is ripe for this form of entertainment – a variety of weapons, well-designed enemies, a tense atmosphere, SPACE travel – but somehow, Gearbox Software bungled up a seemingly easy formula and created this game.
A:CM shows a complete disregard for the fiction it claims to be expanding on. Sure, Gearbox gently placed some throwbacks to the movies in nearly every game environment the player goes to, but the way they took the established story and characters and tossed them all into the maw of a hungry xenomorph does no favors for this title. Gearbox has given us an uninspired, boring, buggy, and unfinished shooter under the pretense of extreme fandom for the beloved Aliens series.
Like the other infamous Gearbox Software product, Duke Nukem Forever, Aliens: Colonial Marines has a host of problems holding it back from being even moderately entertaining. While DNF is ALMOST passable as an occasionally “so-bad-it’s-good” experience, Aliens: CM has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
First and foremost, the game’s story feels rushed and unfinished, which is inexcusable considering this game has reportedly been in development since 2006. Shoddy plot-points include an unemotional romance and bringing a dead Aliens character back to life. 20th Century Fox has said that this game is part of the Aliens canon, but I sincerely hope they retract that statement after forcing myself to play through the horrid five-hour campaign and ugly patchwork of multiplayer modes.
Usually in reviewing a game, at this point I would explain the main plot-points of the story. Aliens: Colonial Marinesdeserves no such attention. You play as a marine that is part of a team sent to the Sulaco to investigate a distress call, and lo-and-behold there are aliens there. That is the brunt of the story before the game falls into inane nonsense.
Aliens: Colonial Marines features graphical prowess that could maybe find itself at home in the last generation of consoles. Ugly low-resolution textures, annoying fog, and poor lighting effects cloud your screen into the messy abomination that is this game. I played it with maxed-out settings on my PC and was sorely disappointed to see the Unreal Engine used so sloppily. It is nearly impossible to feel any immersion in this game when textures are appearing before your eyes and they resemble something we might have seen in the original Quake. I can’t even begin to imagine how Aliens: CM looks on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360. If seams between textures are so prominent here on PC, the game’s other console counterparts can only be worse. Regardless of system choice, if you do not heed any of my advice and proceed to play this game, at least do this for me: Stay away from walls, objects, and characters. Close your eyes or at least leave the semi-useless flashlight off.
A bad plot and poor graphics alone do not necessarily make a bad game; however, throw in pathetic artificial intelligence and uninspired gameplay mechanics and you do have a bad game.
The player is cursed with an “oorah”-ing, moronic lout of a partner for most of the game, who spends the majority of his time shooting at walls (or nothing at all) and spouting forth brilliant lines regarding what “shit” is “blowin’ up” at which time and where. Thankfully the game uses no collision detection between this character and the player and you are able to walk through him when he is in the way (which tends to be always) and get a nice look at the inside of his model.
When you install a game entitled “Aliens”, you have certain expectations about what you may be battling throughout. The aliens in the movies were fast, cunning, and vicious. The xenos we are faced with in A:CM are slow, boring, and prefer to clip through each other than attack you. Their synchronized movements were more calming than arresting, and I found myself in several awkward moments of watching xenos “hugging it out”.
Although the xenomorphs posed little to no threat, there should always be pride in mowing down a swarm of enemies, regardless of the game. It is too bad, then, that basking in your slaughter of these “glorious” kills is nigh-impossible. Enemy bodies have the special ability of becoming air particles and drifting into what I can only imagine is Pitchford’s idea of a “lifestream” after being killed, leaving no evidence that the room you are standing in was a war-zone five seconds ago. It should also be mentioned that xenos (and your allies) in this game have one other odd super-power: They can appear out of thin air before you. The single scariest moment in A:CM was when I was walking down a hallway and was both attacked by an alien that had just appeared out of nothing and saw my companions teleport before me in a cloud of blue smoke.
Aliens are not the only enemies in this roller-coaster ride from Hell. The majority of the game is spent fighting Weyland-Yutani troops, who seem to come from doorways into the abyss. If there is an inaccessible doorway in a level, you can rest assured that a group of soldiers will come spilling out of it at some point, and possibly retreat back through these mysterious portals. Several times I saw a soldier’s arms or legs sticking out of these closed doors, clipping through into the combat area. These highly intelligent creatures often take cover behind nothing, or leave their heads wide open for some over-powered shotgun headshots from great distances.
I found myself sprinting through each of the eleven missions provided, hoping to get to the end and allow myself to get on with my life outside of this inexcusable mess. Despite my sprinting, however, missions were longer than I would have hoped. I would often find myself unsure of which lever to pull or button to press to advance, which caused me to play a sort of hidden-objects game, waiting for the action button prompt to appear while I hugged the walls and hoped for something shiny. Remember finding hidden walls in Wolfenstein 3D? The experience was kind of like that.
Randy Pitchford lied to us. He did nothing but praise the team working on this game and reminisce about that time he met the director of Alien. Gearbox Software let us down. After the great games in the Borderlands series, were we wrong to expect that they could succeed in making a great Aliens game? I would like to think our expectations were justified. We were shown false demo footage, exciting screenshots, and were given many a promise, and so the hype grew. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a broken, ugly mess and I sincerely feel for anyone else who pre-ordered. If you are stuck with it, at least it has multiplayer, and while not quite as bad as the single-player, it still didn’t hold any interest for me.
Know this: Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t even worth a bargain bin purchase six months from now. Do yourself a favor and buy the Aliens movies instead of this game if you are excited about the franchise. My only wish is that this game would disappear like the corpses within it. I can’t believe Steam let me purchase this, but like the predators in AVsP, I’ve got a nasty trophy on my wall now to remind me of this pathetic bug hunt.