Aliens: Colonial Marines

Aliens: Colonial Marines is disappointing in many ways. Though it features some solid mechanics, the game delivers a short single player campaign and some mediocre graphics.

The abysmal graphics and bland shooting make this game a gigantic disappointment, especially if you consider the names involved in its development. Still, it randomly captures the atmosphere of the movies and can be quite fun online. Truly a missed opportunity.

The enemies in this game are just dumb as a damned rock.

It has combat in both its campaign and competitive modes that feels extremely appropriate, and there’s a generous amount of very “Aliens” content here. Just expect the plotting and atmosphere to feel slightly stale throughout.

It’s a shame that a title seven years in the making could result in something so lackluster. Aliens: Colonial Marines had the foundations of a solid game, involving writers (David Weddle and Bradley Thompson from Battlestar Galactica fame) and a talented artist (Syd Mead from Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron). It even had the right voice talent bringing back Lance Henriksen as a Bishop-model clone...But it appears that the elongated, ‘stop-start’ development ultimately resulted in an inconsistent and disappointing final result.

An unremarkable FPS plagued by dim AI and repetitive set-pieces. [Apr 2013, p.68]

Aliens: Colonial Marines is not the bad game that most reviewers have made it out to be. With the reviews it's been getting, you would think it was unplayable! However, the hoax that Pitchford sold with his video demo two years ago has clearly poisoned the well. Everyone seems to want to know: Where is that game? With Colonial Marines supposedly outsourced, all the talent went to Borderlands 2, I guess.

Aliens Colonial Marines is a half baked cake. The recipe and the pictures look delicious but the implementation reveals the only obvious thing: The game's age. Old look, old feeling and old design. Some fresh ideas, a fun multiplayer mode and decent fan service save the day.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a decent love letter to a great sci-fi movie, but it falls short of being something special in its own right. It’s an above-average licensed game, but a below-par shooter. Fans of the franchise will either love it for the subtleties and little details it gets right, or hate it for missing some of the most important parts.

With solid shooting mechanics, well-designed environments and a tense atmosphere, it’s a fine first-person shooter, but its repetitiveness, glitches, substandard graphics and insubstantial story make it a far cry from anything close to matching the prestige of James Cameron’s beloved film.

Once you best the 6-8 hour campaign - and suffer through an absolute butchering of some long-held Aliens narrative themes - it's time to try out the surprisingly solid multiplayer modes. While the head-to-head options will likely be an afterthought for many franchise faithful, the online throwdowns actually manage to capture the Aliens feel better than the campaign itself.

Colonial Marines can't trade on nostalgia alone... It needed to offer intense combat against an unstoppable force, deft storytelling that matched the cinematic flair of the films, and some new ideas that could have rejuvenated an overexposed franchise. It needed, in short, to be a better game.

This is really a review of two games: a derivative story campaign (that you can play solo or with up to three friends in co-op) and a riveting, far superior multiplayer mode that allows you to compete as marines or alien xenomorphs in online matches. Considering Colonial Marines’ relatively long gestation period — roughly six years — it seems more attention was paid to fine-tuning multiplayer than to the campaign.

A missed chance both for Sega/Gearbox and every Aliens or even FPS genre fan. Unsatisfying in every aspect, Aliens: Colonial Marines doesn't do justice to the name it carries.

In essence if Colonial Marines were chocolate it would be Cadbury's; it's chocolate, has all the ingredients of chocolate, but the only real attraction is the name, the quality leaving you somewhat hollow and unfulfilled.

This is a wasted chance. While Rebellion's Aliens vs. Predator remake at least occasionally managed to deliver horror atmosphere and suspense, Colonial Marines mutates to a rather dull run-and-gun-experience, while the visuals seem older than the movie this is based on.

If you’re a fan of sci-fi classics Aliens: Colonial Marines will be worth a nostalgic trip down memory lane because of the authenticity in the game. Even the multiplayer is worth a shot, but the generic and boring single player mode will not entertain you for long. On nearly every field this game falls short and adds little to the first-person shooter genre.

Due to the simplicity of the levels and lack of enemy diversity, the game experience was extremely short; it took 2 players about 5 hours to finish the campaign on hardened difficulty, and to be clearer, we can say that the only difference between difficulties lays in damage resistance and the lack of a HUD.

Even though I have a terribly high tolerance for bad monster movies, I still couldn't find an excuse for Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game has been in development for over five years, and nearly every single component has some major flaw. It's yet another black eye on a franchise that's already taken a heavy beating.

Sad, boring and at times buggy beyond belief. The Aliens seem weak, the tension absent and even though the set pieces are great, the whole game feels bland. The last half of the game improves a bit, but by then you have already lost all faith. Mediocre at best. In space no one can hear you cry.

It’s not all bad. Through the slow-boil of falling standards, sometimes we found ourselves not hating it as much we probably should have and, occasionally, there were glimpses of what Aliens: Colonial Marines could have been, should have been. It’s best at being an intense shooter, but sadly that intensity is all too rare.

As a player, you would expect a survival horror game but it's nothing more than a normal shooter. But there are better shooters available. ACM contains bugs and fails on the graphical aspects. Not worth a buy.

I haven’t been this disappointed in a game in a long, long time. Not only does the campaign welch on its opportunity to create interesting and additive content in the Aliens universe, but the multiplayer is languid, broken, and laughably frustrating. Colonial Marines plays it as safe as possible and still can’t manage to copy successfully proven ideas.

Like a trip to a natural history museum. It's empty and nostalgic, meticulous and dated. More importantly, it's hands-off. Like a museum, Colonial Marines is at its best when you're admiring the view. The moment you attempt to reach out to interact you're met with a barrier, reminding you that you're there to look, not to touch.

If Colonial Marines were a film it would be one of those quiet indiscretions sent directly to video, but instead it's a game, one in which every interactive and visible aspect feels dated by any measure.

There are some feelings of nostalgia to be enjoyed, but it soon wears off and all that is left is some bog standard run ‘n’ gun action that brings little of note to the FPS table - and it suffers from a severe lack of optimisation on PS3 and 360.

And that's Colonial Marines' biggest problem: enemies come, and you shoot them down easily, again and again. The game is remarkably light on variety. A couple of battles masquerade as boss fights, but they require no strategy and are just as easy and thrill-less as the rest. The four- to five-hour campaign has no thrust to it; it feels the same from beginning to end, and the finale just drops with a thud. And by being so easy and predictable, the game lets down the license.

Fundamentally, it is flawed with poor design and weak content. Colonial Marines feels dated, and fails to capture any essence of what an Alien game should be. Though Aliens: Colonial Marines has been crafted with the fans in mind, it just needed a stronger approach in its design, accompanied by some serious polish.

There was a lot of hope for Aliens: Colonial Marines but it seems the gaming world is let down with another attempt to make a successful film tie in. The review should give you a few good reasons why the game suffers but other aspects such as the overused catchphrase ‘Stay frosty!’ and anticlimactic ending are a couple more to add to the list and this is why you should wait until this game gets thrown into the bargain bin before you purchase.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is both disappointing and sad. The plot plays out like a bad fan-made film with unintentionally bad acting and ties to familiar things because it didn't have any original ideas. The gameplay feels dated and out of step with the evolution of the shooter. Bugs are rampant throughout the title, and the game lacks a level of polish that was expected during the first year of this console generation.

Overall the game is a big disappointment - often frustrating, dated and has little in the way of reward or replay value.

You know how some games are so bad, they’re actually fun to play? Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t one of those games. It’s just bad.

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 be remembered for a long time, but for all the wrong reasons. What a shame. I just feel sorry for those who bought the Season Pass… since there probably won’t be a Season now.

Building a game around James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi classic should be the recipe for a tense, action-packed shooter bursting with atmosphere and scares. Instead we get one of the biggest disappointments in recent years. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a shameful, at times broken, and consistently woeful waste of potential.

Take away the Aliens license, and you’ve got a shooter that has no reason to exist.

The failure of Aliens: Colonial Marines runs deeper than a clumsy stab at sliding into the Alien canon, though. It’s not just a poor Aliens experience, it’s a poor game. There’s a stiffness to the movement and a lack of feedback to the vanilla weapon line-up that’s unexpected from Gearbox Software.

Certainly, many of Colonial Marines’ flaws could have been excusable back in the early days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but now, when every title is polished to a near excruciating level of quality, it just doesn’t cut it.

Repetitive gameplay, plenty of bugs and bad graphics. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a bad game, a really bad one.

I would definitely suggest avoiding Aliens: Colonial Marines entirely or at least just rent it if you feel like you need to experience it yourself. Certainly don’t buy it.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a poor game made worse by the extensive hype that the game mustered over its six year development.

As a fan of the series, the game was horrible to play, and this review was heart-breaking to write. For purely sentimental reasons, this was one of the games that fans would have been desperate to see succeed. Somewhere along the line, we were all let down. What makes it worse are the occasional flashes of a good game that flash through.

Aliens Colonial Marines is old-school, that's for sure. A little bit too much so, unfortunately. With three different developers and a several year delay, it was predictable... Graphs from 2005, AI from 1895 and poor story writing amount to a too-heavy burden. And you can't even compensate for that by being highly loyal to the movies. This game is just a waste - of time for the studios, of money for you.

It makes me wonder: did Gearbox actually sit down and watch the Alien movies?

Even if it were polished to an acceptable, 2013-standard AAA shine, Colonial Marines would still only be a generic effort coasting on borrowed iconography. Weighed down by so many grindingly obvious mechanical issues, it never even gets off the ground. For a game all about exterminating bugs, it's a fatal irony.

I'm not that witty, but I am pretty vulgar—as a result, all I can say is that if Aliens: Colonial Marines had been fished out of a Marine's colon during emergency surgery it wouldn't surprise me in the least.