Aliens: Colonial Marines

If you’re looking for a different multiplayer shooter, Aliens: Colonial Marines is an excellent choice. Fans will love to haunt in the skin of a Xenomorph. If you expect an engaging and immersive story of Aliens, I am sorry but this is not what you’re looking for.

If Gearbox’s quality scale has Borderlands 2 at one end and Duke Nukem at the other, Colonial Marines sits somewhere in the middle.

Aliens are back in the videogame scene. However, this game does little justice to the film series and lags behind in technical aspects when compared to other current titles. Nonetheless, the different game modes –competitive and cooperative– will guarantee the fun that the solo campaign is lacking.

Besides the lack of tension or even jump scares, the abominable quality of the game's graphics and animations is another one of Colonial Marines' biggest flaws. The aliens stumble towards you, looking like the local town drunk who just stole an Alien mask. [March 2013, p.78]

A major disappointment in almost every way. The AI is dumb, the graphics obsolete, the animations at times absolutely horrible and the story boring. It's not scary, not engaging and certainly not exiting. It's just not good, period.

As a shooter, you’ve been here a hundred times before. As an Aliens game it suffers the pressure of the legacy on which it’s built, and the story is diabolically woeful. Game over, man. [April 2013, p72]

The representation of the xenomorphs is the game’s most damaging failure. They’re just not dangerous enough, reduced by a first mission deluge into a swarm of targets bearing the shape of a familiar, once-horrific symbol of death. But they have none of that pop icon’s grace or deadliness.

Dangerously close to the Duke Nukem Forever case, Aliens: Colonial Marines at last sees the light, bringing a correct FPS with good and bad aspects. With the first aspect we have a truly reliable recreation of Cameron's Aliens universe that constantly pays homage to its source with every detail of its scenarios, characters, soundtrack and weapons. On the other hand, the whole level of tension the game manages to create is lost in the battles due to a poor Enemy AI, graphical issues and unbalanced gameplay. A good experience for fans, but another common FPS to everyone who doesn't know the movie.

Aliens: Colonial Marines stings of bitter disappointment; fans of the franchise will dually be delighted by the fan service, but appalled at the misappropriation of the license and the liberties taken with the new Xenomorphs; while those just looking for a suspenseful horror title will find little more than a run-of-the-mill corridor shooter. It’s Duke Nukem Forever all over again.

Colonial Marines has definitely been crafted with a lot of love for the franchise, it just needed a little more imagination - and a hell of a lot more polish.

Buggy, ugly, and somehow unfinished after ten years...A huge disappointment. [Issue#229, p.68]

It has been delayed for more than a decade and yet it still has parts that look that old and still not finished. A basically broken Aliens game is to some degree saved by Gearbox's unquestionable love for the franchise and the ability to play the campaign split-screen.

This would be fine if much of the action was not just so vanilla. This is a solid shooter, but not the game that Aliens fans had long hoped for.

Aliens: Colonial Marines’ odious mess can be smelled from low orbit, and only the most ardent Aliens fans will find anything redeeming.

The whole idea was probably doomed from the start but this is a disappointingly slipshod effort, with a story campaign that somehow feels more old-fashioned than the decades-old movie it’s based on.

Aliens: Colonial Marines has little to nothing in the way of redeeming value.

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.

Even after more than seven years in development, Aliens: Colonial Marines results in a cavalcade of shattered dreams and lost potential. Almost every element is either broken, boring or badly designed and the once fearsome Xenomorphs are now reduced to mindless cannon fodder. To put it simply; it's a terrible game.

These tributes may be enough to see hardcore fans through to the end. For everyone else, Aliens: Colonial Marines will probably be little more than an acid-soaked double-jaw to the chest.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a failure. It’s buggy, not a great deal of fun, and filled with unlikeable characters that desperately attempt to further a plot that you'll promptly lose interest in.

Colonial Marines is not only a bad film adaptation, it's one of the worst first person shooters recently published.

Other than the fact that it is using the Alien IP, the game fails to bring any tension even in the simplest of ways, as it trips over its own feet at every step. It feels like a rushed product in almost every aspect of its design, and for something that could have been so great, it is now little more than a black mark on Gearbox Software’s track record.

This is the very definition of a shameless cash-cow. Anyone of sound mind must steer clear.