Aliens Colonial Marines Review
“You better get ready for this shit”
I never played Colonial Marines before Xenomonth, I never picked it up since it was drowning in hatred and named one of the biggest disappointments in recent memory. It was also meant to be the canon sequel Aliens or Alien3 I guess, which is a pretty big deal if you’re an Alien fan. I snatched up the limited edition of Aliens Colonial Marines for £1.50, that’s less that the normal edition I picked up for Aliens Vs Predator which came out a whole 3 years before. So Aliens Colonial Marines had a crazy low bench mark for me so unless it was atrociously bad, it would have been better than expected. Let’s go through that.
The game opens like a movie with weird bold opening credits and the setup, this is where the game itself gives you a spoiler but anyway you play as the marine Winter who lands on Lv-426 after the marine’s ship gets torn apart. They were there because they got Hick’s distress call. LV-426 is overrun with Weyland-Yutani soldiers and Xenomorphs and to make things worse, your friend and fellow marine has a Xeno inside of her. Throughout the game you try to fight off the Xenos, the soldiers, get the chest buster out of your teammate and escape the planet with a captured marine you have to rescue. The story is pretty plain until it starts throwing stupid things at you and a character who had no reason to show up but to just be a shock to the audience but probably leaves them more puzzled then surprised.
This game has a little character development and it tries to give you some emotional and dramatic moments but I found myself just not really caring. They are just not that engaging and it’s hard to get attached to any of them. The main character is a tough marine guy with a heart and so is the secondary character O’Neal and I guess Bella Is too, the captain is just like any other captain and you might be thinking it sounds a lot like Aliens and I didn’t complain about that but Aliens has so much more life to it character wise and the banter in Aliens is great, the banter in Colonial Marines is potentially good but comes off flat and it feels like it’s in there because Aliens had it so they had to have it.
The gameplay is so underwhelming, it does nothing for me. The aliens aren’t even the main enemy in this game, they share it with fucking enemy gunmen, which are more fun to fight than the fucking Xenomorphs! That’s not a good sign. The aliens A.I is just mindless, they run at you, like straight forward towards you. No creeping around the walls or trying to get behind you, as soon as the warfare begins, they run straight at you, arms open in the same shitty animation each time. They provide no challenge, the only issue you have with them is when you’re reloading and they just spam you to death with their hands while you do it. Fighting humans can be stupid too, there’s cover based combat but grenades are pretty much instadeath, you can’t do shit with grenades, you’re probably going to die. They just appear and you never have enough time to move. This is an Aliens game where the aliens aren’t the main enemy and the aliens aren’t scary anyway. Yes, there’s a few different kinds of Xeno in this game, one of the others stands in the same spot and spits at you and the other you encountered is in a level without weapons but more on that one later. The boss fights are horrendous too. One of them is press two buttons to beat up this big Xeno, who takes 100 hits and little, hard to hit Xenos claw at you at the same time so you die, rinse and repeat and this is a power loader fight, this should be the coolest part of the game but it’s one of the worst. The final big boss is beaten by pulling 5 levers, it’s not some final big epic showdown like it should be and the general gameplay as a whole is just boring. There’s not much to it. They even imply a couple of vehicle driving missions but there isn’t any.
At least I don’t hate all of the new alien’s designs, I don’t like the idea of them but you need them in the game for variety and I think the spitters look cool enough, the big rhino like ones don’t really feel like a Xenomorph does and the husks just look like rejects. Speaking of the husks, there’s one mission in this game that is a cool change of pace, well it is at first. This is the game’s big attempt at horror which starts off pretty good but ends up being tedious and overdone by the end of the level. The levels look good though, I like the designs most of the time and a lot of them feel like alien. The derelict ship and LV-426 are actually pretty good and are probably the best thing in the game. The legendary weapons are cool too and they are really powerful but so easy to find, I found them all on my first playthrough, without help by just casually looking around. But at least there’s plenty of options when it comes to guns.
The direction of the game is at least understandable, I understand what’s going on and where the story is going, it’s a shame the story is dumb and makes no sense and includes a previous Aliens movie character who really shouldn’t be there, I can’t accept this game as canon, it’s a total loss with me and as I’ve heard, other people too. Actually that’s the reason why it’s no longer canon. That’s right, the game was so poorly received that they decided it wasn’t canon too and then Sega was sued for false advertising. I also felt as if the game was missing sound effects or music or they just didn’t know how to make any scene more effective. This led to the first big Xenomorph reveal being 0% shocking or scary.
Aliens Colonial Marines is flat, ineffective and borderline child’s play. It’s playable and has plenty of gun options but the gameplay is stale and tedious. You could be bored to tears or just simply dislike what this game adds to the Xenoverse but it’s likely that you will not enjoy it. But it looks pretty good, so there’s that. Then again, the people don’t look very good.
Rating: **
Better than > The Zoo Race Worse than > Aliens vs Predator
Main pros
-Choice of weapons
-Nice environments
Main cons
-Story
-Characters
-Gameplay
-Too easy/Straightforward
-Repetitive
-Totally un-epic boss fights
-Uninteresting Xenomorphs
-Dumb A.I.
It’s worth £1.50, so if you can pick it up for that price then buy it and have an awful time like me, I generally just wanted the game to be over with.
