Aliens: Colonial Marines

In a few years you can create an extraordinary work, but for Aliens: Colonial Marines the extremely long production period turned out to be insufficient. The game fails almost everywhere.

Sci-fi shooters have borrowed elements from the Alien movies for as long as I can remember. Gearbox’s Alien: Colonial Marines started off looking like it had potential.  Unfortunately, the final product leaves much to be desired.  The game feels empty, clunky and dated.  Initially, there was much promise in the meticulous recreation of the film’s sights and sounds.  Strobing lights and shadows creep along the functional future decks of the Sulaco while various audio queues whir and buzz around your character, reminding players of the game’s roots.  The inventory of pulse rifles, shotguns and s...

“Years after its 2008 reveal, Aliens: Colonial Marines shudders to life as a broken, poorly executed co-op shooter.”

The biggest achievement in this title is that it works as a shooter, but the gameplay, plot, visuals, and audio don't do it any justice. The multiplayer lessens the experience even further by providing a simplistic experience that only deters players from playing more than one round. It's really hard to believe that Gearbox was even involved with this title at all.

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I have some bad news...

What's worse is that this is a game that leverages a beloved sci-fi property to suck as many $60 purchases out of fans as it can. The Aliens faithful have already shown their willingness to jump head first into anything that loosely connects to the franchise, so in that regard the existence of Colonial Marines feels exploitative. While it's hard to know just who to blame (main developer Gearbox Software claims much of the campaign was outsourced to TimeGate), Aliens should have been much better, but the fact that it's this bad just makes the game an embarrassment.

After six years, mountains of hype and some suspiciously deceptive demos that are nothing like the final game, Gearbox’s reputation as a “Borderlands and crap games that take far too long” studio is now assured. I’m pretty sure that in six years I could make a better Aliens game than this, on my own, and that includes having to learn how to make games. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a slap in the face to anyone who put the game on their Most Wanted list at any point since 2007. It’ll b...

Five minutes into Aliens: Colonial Marines the game makes a mistake from which it cannot recover, a mistake so fatal that you may as well eject the disc, toss it in the bin and forget that it ever existed. Let me tell you about it.