Aliens Colonial Marines Review

When I play a game, I look for certain things that make me enjoy it. One of the main things I look at is story. If the story doesn't capture me, then I can't get into a game. When that happens, I don't enjoy the game. Aliens: Colonial Marines has a story that is... well... slow. The characters aren't very fleshed out and don't leave much there to care for. However, it is an Aliens game.They aren't known for their gripping story and their flavorful (well, maybe that's the wrong word, haha) characters.Along with story, atmosphere is a big must. I believe that as a gamer, if the player doesn't feel the game, then it isn't doing its job. Now, I'm not one to complain about graphics, but if the way the game looks doesn't set up the atmosphere, then there's a problem. So, in that sense graphics do matter, and this game does not live up to the Aliens name. Like many have said, the game feels incomplete. To make that easier to understand, it felt like I was playing the game on very low video settings and couldn't turn them up. Even the game's settings were lacking, in that even if I wanted to turn it up, I couldn't do much at all. There were two sliders for changing video quality. No advanced options at all, which wouldn't be an issue if the
game didn't look the way it did.

Explosions seemed to be missing particle effects or in some cases effects in general. The same goes for bullet impacts and most anything where you'd expect particle effects. I remember looking up at the sky at a cloud of smoke. That cloud looked like a 2D sprite that was just crawling across a fog filled sky. The lights in the game have no bloom, no dynamics, and really no glows. I felt like I was playing in high contrast mode. Things that have been standard in games for almost 5-10 years now were completely missing.

The animations were glitchy. Doing a melee attack looked broken, and for most of them, I didn't even know what was going on. The alien would be in mid attack to my left and then would almost teleport three feet from me and to my front (and even from that far I would still get burned by acid when I killed it). The AI in the game moved around like robots and, half the time, didn't move their mouths when they talked. Enemies would go through walls or get stuck in place. A few times I had game breaking bugs that wouldn't allow me to move forward in the game.



Overall, the game looked and felt like it was still in Beta. This pulled me out of the game, and I didn't feel anything when playing because of that. When I played the last Aliens vs Predators I felt scared as a gamer. I believed that I was alone and that these creatures were something to fear. At any moment one could jump out of the darkness and kill me. A game like Aliens needs to be that way. It needs to play off the emotions of the gamer. However, A:CM didn't even try to. The levels were so well lit, that I could see anything coming at me from very far off. I'm still thinking that tomorrow I'll wake up and Gearbox or Sega will have sent out a press release saying that everyone was shipped the Beta of the game instead of the full one. However, that's not looking like it'll happen. Hopefully the next company will change that, because Gearbox (or whoever actually made the game) didn't do a good job.

Now, with all that said, there's some good. Very little good, but it's there.

As it is with most of Gearbox's games, the co-op is super easy to set up. The multi-player isn't so bad either (aside from some clunky controls and a few issues with the way the game works). However, just like the single player portion of the game, it still feels incomplete, but there's a lot of potential. All Gearbox needs to do is fix it. A couple of updates and this game would be 100x better.

As is, the game is giving Gearbox a bad name. This is twice now that they have let people down (remember Duke Nukem?), and Aliens fans don't forget easily. Now's the time that Gearbox needs to make it up to us, and if they don't, I for one will be hesitant to buy any of their (non-Borderlands) games.


Recommendation: Even if you're an Aliens fan, I'd wait for a sale.

Twitch

-Two of the screenshots are from SovietDoom.
-The twitch is a video of him and me playing the co-op that I thought we should add.