Michael Biehn, the actor who reprised his role of Corporal Dwayne Hicks from Alien 2: El regreso (1986), admitted to only giving a half-hearted performance because he could sense the developers didn't have passion for the project.
The story of the game is somewhat based on one unused concept story for Alien³ (1992) written by William Gibson, where Cpl. Hicks and another team of Colonial Marines discover a top secret Weyland-Yutani research facility that is focused on using the Aliens as Bio-Weapons.
The rather erratic and buggy behavior of the xenomorph AI was the result of a simple typo during coding.
Publisher SEGA and developer Gearbox Software were sued for false advertisement in a class action lawsuit by two of the game's players because the game looked quite different than what early advertisement had promised. The game's demos and screenshots that were shown during the E3 in 2011 were run on high-end computers that were much more powerful than the intended consoles; when optimized for the older PS3 and Xbox 360, the game's software had to be scaled back so much that the finished game looked much poorer than the earlier versions. Gearbox was eventually dropped from the suit as it was only the game's developer and did not have marketing responsibility, and the lawsuit lost class-action status by 2015.
Due to a large number of fans of James Cameron's Alien 2: El regreso (1986) within Gearbox, the creative team decided to make this game a sequel to it. Futurist Syd Mead, who had worked on Aliens, was hired to keep the new designs visually consistent with the movie. Aliens: Colonial Marines was originally announced as the official sequel to Aliens, but after the game's overwhelmingly negative reception, its canon status was dropped.