Aliens: Colonial Marines Review

After Duke Nukem’ Forever, you wouldn’t be insane to doubt Gearbox Software’s capabilities. But hold on a sec, they were only finishing off someone else’s mess right? They were just keen to finally get the game out. Even so, pride should have stopped them releasing it in such a poor state.

Then Borderlands 2 came along and was met with great sales and wide critical acclaim. So, maybe their frequently delayed Aliens: Colonial Marines would be ok on the day. After all, it’s been Gearbox’s game since birth and numerous videos clearly show a franchise-adoring staff. So, they wouldn’t f**k it up, right? Cue the angry sobbing.

Colonial Marines isn’t an abject failure, it’s just incredibly disappointing. Yes, gamers, film fans and journos had hyped the hell out of it ahead of release, but surely everyone deserved something better than a bog-standard shooter with the Aliens skin thrown over the top.

The story sees another batch of marines returning to the Solaco and to Hadley’s Hope on the planet below to investigate what happened to their colleagues –the marines of Aliens. This provides numerous pleasing references to the movies. Bishop’s legs in the cargo bay, missing floor panels from where Newt was hiding from the queen, the marines’ lockers, the med bay where Ripley was attacked by face huggers, you even get to defend the same room that the first marines initially encountered the xenos.

Nostalgia aside though, the new story is far from the promised ‘proper sequel’ to Aliens. Frankly, the inclusion of a returning Corporal Hicks is ridiculous and insulting both to the canon and the fans. There’s a tenuous link to Prometheus, but nothing you can’t see coming a mile off.

Anyways, it’s starting to hurt my knuckles typing with semi-clenched fists, so let’s have a look at what the game does right. Many of the positives come from assets that were spoon-fed to Gearbox from 20th Century Fox, namely the excellent sound design. The music matches the tempo throughout the game. Quiet scenes and tip-toeing through the dark have sparse audio cues to creep you out, while large scale standoff music does its best to put you into the frantic mood of the second movie. The weapons sound fantastic, with the inimitable sound of the pulse rifle perfectly accompanying the high-pitched alien screams.

Firing the weapons is a solid experience too. Pulse rifles chew through enemies with ease and the tactical shotgun will probably become one of your favourite shotguns in gaming thanks to its rapid and deadly firing. XP is earned throughout, allowing you to upgrade secondary fire features, sights, ammo and so on. I made a few tweaks, but generally found most of them unnecessary.

Guns are all well and good, but it’s a shame I can’t say the same of the targets. The first xenomorph I encountered was a tough bastard. Absorbing loads of ammo and frequently escaping back into the shadows. ‘Sh*t’, I thought, this is going to be tough if they’re all that hard to kill. This was a false set-up though as for the rest of the game, these standard drones fall apart with a short pulse rifle blast (not even a controlled one) .

You won’t only be dealing with drones; a few new strains have evolved -with a bit of Weyland Yutani lab-assistance. So basically, some of them spit acid and there are a few massive ones that look like a combination of a queen and a Triceratops. My second hour of the game featured no aliens at all, as our marines came under fire from Wey Yu security forces on clean-up duty. They crop up throughout the game and never really feel like they’re in the right game. Although, three-way battles in open ground between them, you and the aliens are quite interesting as you weigh up the bigger threat in different situations.

You rarely feel threatened by the aliens though. Sure you have armour that melts like butter as soon as an alien sneezes on it and your health bar is split into three blocks that each only regenerate if not fully depleted (exactly like Resistance: Fall of Man on PS3), but enemies fall apart so easily under fire that it’s hard to feel panic or excitement. Corridors require little caution, but open areas at least require that you look around rather than hose the middle of the screen.

One particularly strong scene is worth mentioning and that’s sneaking through the sewers unarmed past numerous alien ‘husks’, some of which come alive and blindly wade their way towards you as you cower and freeze to avoid detection. It’s the most atmospheric scene by miles and the erratic strobed lighting effects make it incredibly intense on both the mind and the eyes.

The use of the motion scanner is almost redundant. It is at least authentic, with familiar design and gallingly vague readings thanks to the aliens appearing from anywhere. You can’t hold it and shoot in a loose attempt to inject some fear, just assume there’s always something nearby that wants to nom your face.

Technical bugs and rough edges appear throughout. AI players will freeze when you need them to open a door. Sometimes I had to stand on top of pickups and stare at my feet before the button prompt appeared. I’ve been shot through solid cover. Trophy pings during cutscenes cut the sound for a few seconds. The game frequently loses momentum to load the next area, although the loading is hidden in-game in the form of whirring doors that take forever to open. There were two patches on launch day, so who knows what else they’ve cleaned up.

Onto the game’s looks. Compare the ‘gameplay’ demo we saw at the summer expos with the game you can buy off the shelf and it becomes clear that Gearbox are completely full of sh*t. This isn’t a case of the game running on a higher spec PC, it was a different game. Already, the internet is awash with comparison videos of the same scene and the difference is appalling. Nests lack the fog effects, textures no longer ooze with alien secretion, lighting is poorer, explosions lack detail and even the alien animations have been replaced with jerky motions. The version we saw in the summer was essentially a video, or made with custom animations and tarted up effects for a demo. These fancy features are nowhere to be seen in the final game. How often do you get to say a game looks worse on release than before it was finished? Gearbox, Sega…you should be ashamed.

After grinding my way through this sinfully ugly mess in single-player I started again co-op. Four players can work through the game whole game together. An obvious trick that many co-op titles miss is a basic score count between levels, thankfully there is one here and it’s good fun trying to beat your fellow marines to the best kill count.

I couldn’t stick with the game in co-op for long though. Despite all four of us having a decent ‘ping rating,’ lag was frequently an issue with it directly affecting our targets. Lining up longer shots became tiresomely difficult as enemies would disappear only to appear ten feet away before suddenly reappearing dead five feet to the side again. The only way gamers will be able to enjoy co-op is if this is patched and they ramp up the aliens to make them more challenging.

Competitive online multiplayer pitches aliens against marines. The aliens take some getting used to. They play in third-person and can see humans through any surface at great distances. However, they’re easy to kill head-on, so you’ll have to get used to climbing the walls and sneaking up on marines. Transitioning between surfaces is often clumsy though and the alien’s movement is sluggish, it’s just too easy to be caught out. There are different types to choose from, but their melee moves and spitting acid attacks are horribly unresponsive, with even the execution moves from behind taking forever to activate. Being able to squeeze through vents and occasionally sneak up behind a hapless marine can feel rewarding though.

Playing as a marine is straight forward in comparison. They handle in typical FPS fashion with campaign XP and upgrades carrying over. The motion scanner is used to much greater effect in multiplayer than in the story. Desperately trying to see the aliens that your scanner is warning you about is a brilliantly tense experience when you have your backs to the walls and something that I never experienced in the campaign.

Modes for competitive matches involve two rounds as sides take turns as each species. A team deathmatch mode is supported by a base mode with the marines trying to blow up egg batches. Escape sees the marines trying to reach an extraction zone through a series of areas. The player names over the aliens are absent in this mode, which initially made me think they were AI ones. Not so, they have infinite respawns, while the marines are limited to one life. It can feel like a thankless task as the aliens as you’re even easier to kill than in the other modes, so getting behind marines is more important than ever. Difficult, when they’re constantly running towards an exit and you respawn in the opposite direction.

Future DLC promises a hoard mode, presumably for co-op against AI xenos, but considering the buggy nature of co-op and the general blandness that permeates every pore of the game, who’s going to bother? Anyone considering buying a season pass for the game should probably consider the possibility of some very deserted servers in the near future.

Throwing in a few visual references to the films and naming Trophies after famous lines shouldn’t have been as good as it got from Gearbox’s campaign mode. Showing gamers a completely different product at E3 to the one we’re playing now is utterly despicable behaviour too. In co-op the game can barely stand and despite improvements in the competitive multiplayer, it’s not something that you’re going to bother coming back to after a few days of play.