Aliens: Colonial Marines

Despite the negative reviews, this game is actually pretty good and worth playing if your a fan of the Alien movies. It takes place just after Aliens (the second movie) but has a new set of characters on a different mission, however Hicks and Bishop from the second movie both appear as supporting characters and they are both voiced by the actors that play them in the movie (Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen) which is pretty awesome. The plot is above average, but it is really just there so that the action has reason to play out. The action is great however and the gameplay and controls are good (despite what some users have said about messed up controls). The aliens in the game are well done and there are a good variety of them. The graphics are good but they could easily have come from a game made ten years ago. On the downside, there are one or two glitches every so often (however they don't prevent you from moving forward in the game) and sometimes the AI is a little buggy and it occasionally affects the gameplay in a negative way. Also the game just suddenly comes to a halt and just ends unexpectedly, in a weak and uninteresting way and it may make you angry. Overall, I would recommend this game because, despite its flaws, it is a lot of fun and the multiplayer is well thought out and very enjoyable. 6.5/10. (Additionally, the game does a good job of being scary; particularly when you get to use the Alien radar machine which detects Aliens closing in on you and makes a beeping noise which gets faster and faster the closer they get).

Once upon a time the awesome Alien franchise was born... When i switched on my Xbox 360 earlier this week and played this game i quickly realised that the franchise, specifically in respect of video gaming, is dead and buried. The graphics are too sharp yet ill detailed and not at all Alien-esque... The titles are also juvenile attempts at mimicking the movies and are awful. The levels belong on an original xbox or PS2 release and are dreary, tiresome, repetitive and ill conceived. The interface isn't innovative in any way and must have been designed on the back of the blank cheque that Sega wrote Gearbox to bring this high school project to fruition.

I've been playing video games for 30 years and not ever has a publisher spent so much dollar on promotion for such a bland, weightless, empty shell of a concept that has not materialised into any semblance of a 21st century hi-def title.

In conclusion its like playing a several year old platinum title that has no place being in the modern era of video gaming. A poor poor title that'll keep you happy (in anticipation only) for about 10 minutes (if you're a die-hard Alien fan) before the disc is on its way to trade in for store credit.

What were 20th Century Fox thinking?! PS. Give the trailer director credit for clever editing, tricking us all into believing that we were actually buying something of substance.

The first thing you will notice is the absolutely dated textures, some fancy new design would have been nice as well but they have paid some attention to detail. Admittedly the game does look rather bland in 2D but crank up the 3D eyewear and it looks quite good. Its rather surprising that this game has garnered so many negs as it really isn't all that bad. There are some quite tense moments where you are just waiting for a face-hugger to suck your face off but all in all It looks as though they threw something together just to cash in. Actually playing the game isn't all that bad. Other game manufacturers go all the way and pay so much attention to detail but not so this crowd. For instance a lot of the time you are shooting at an Alien and your team mate gets in the way - other games you would be severely admonished "Hey stop shooting at me"! but this one your team mates don't mind. (so much for reality) NVidia rate this game as average in the 3D rating but I found it virtually unplayable until I downloaded the Helix fix. If you want to play in 3D it is recommended that you apply this fix. You need to be slightly higher than a casual PC user in expertise to be able to extract the fix to the proper directory but it is well worth doing as before the fix, lights from other marines helmets were on the wrong plane and torchlights were in 2D - the whole thing looked messed up. Do a web search for Helix 3d fix etc, its only a tiny 33KB download. Why cant you simply install a game on Steam without having to perform an hour of updates? That is so annoying especially if you only play the single player campaign. The majority of the updates are probably multiplayer fixes. Don't be put off by the negative reviews, its worth a look just buy it when the price has gone down to $20.00 or so, maybe get it from a bargain basement seller! If 6.5 out of ten were there that would be my rating maybe even 7!

I need to make it clear that before going into reviewing "Aliens: Colonial Marines," that James Cameron's "Aliens" (1986), the superior, action-packed sequel to Ridley Scott's infamous, landmark 1979 deep-space horror/sci-fi flick "Alien," is one of my all-time personal favorite movies.

"Aliens" is my fifth favorite movie of all time; I grew up with this movie, and I personally consider it to be far better in every conceivable way and fashion, than "Alien" (though I must also readily admit my great fondness for Scott's original masterpiece).

So you can imagine my surprise when news finally came out that a video game billing itself as a genuine sequel to Cameron's "Aliens" was in development. Unlike most people who have relentlessly trashed "Aliens: Colonial Marines" since its February 2013 release, I feel that I'm somewhere in the middle. I at least thought it looked nice, and it was good to see some sort of continuation - however sloppy - to "Aliens." The story to "Aliens: Colonial Marines" basically details a war between the United States Colonial Marines and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation's private army of heavily armed hired mercenaries, who are illegally breeding the hideous Xenomorph creatures using captured Marines and innocent space colonists as hosts.

It all sounds exciting, doesn't it? But it does have many issues...

The game itself has an incredibly clumsy story - which I already detailed briefly - that thoroughly contradicts established events from the film, and game-play that's pretty typical of any high-tech first-person shooter in recent years, since it was stated fairly early on by the developers that the game would feature squad-based game-play (we all thought it was going to be a war game in outer space, like the movie), and would feature the return of genuine flesh & blood performers from Cameron's 1986 action epic reprising their original roles from the film - Michael Biehn (Corporal Hicks) and Lance Henriksen (Bishop); if you could get the additional DLC packs, additional actors from the film - Al Matthews (Sergeant Apone), Mark Rolston (Private Drake), and (?) Bill Paxton (Private Hudson) (?) - would also be reprising their roles.

In terms of basic first-person shooter game-play, "Aliens: Colonial Marines" does feature some of the iconic weaponry from the movie, as well as familiar locales on-board the Colonial Marine space vessel the USS Sulaco, and the ruins of the space colony Hadley's Hope on the desolate planetoid LV-426 (and there's even a sequence in the middle of the game featuring the Derelict Spacecraft from "Alien" and featured briefly in a restored scene from the extended director's cut of "Aliens"). The game does not, however, recreate the claustrophobic tension and terror of Cameron's film (much less feature any of the landmark score composed for the film by James Horner), and most of the game's confrontations feature you gunning down hordes and hordes of approaching Xenomorphs (though you'll have your AI comrades and maybe a robot sentry or two to aid you - somewhat). There are little tasks you have to complete here & there to advance the story, but much of everything in "Aliens: Colonial Marines" consists of the player shooting aliens.

Some of the gun battles where you encounter the alien creatures can be frustrating - and even overwhelming (but not in a particularly good way) - at times, which is about the only authentic thing about them that even comes close to Cameron's "Aliens." Other than that, it's a pretty straight-forward first-person shooter that initially billed itself as the future of the "Alien" franchise in the video game world (which is ironic considering the possibility that "Aliens" has arguably had the single greatest influence on the overall development of the first-person shooter genre).

Despite the clunky story, there are a bunch of little tidbits that reference Cameron's film, which shows that the game developers may have spent too much time watching the movie rather than understanding it and trying to recreate the action and suspense it delivered.

"Aliens" will always rate as one of my all-time greatest movies, and one of the scariest, and most action-packed, sci-fi films ever made. The game that aimed to expand its story and legacy - "Aliens: Colonial Marines" - is not so much. It's a big disappointment, albeit an enjoyable disappointment. I got my kicks out of playing this game, mostly by enjoying the numerous references to "Aliens" (which include having to collect dog-tags of the Colonial Marine characters, among other little items, from the film), which took me back to the moments where it all started.

It's all too bad, really, because this could have been an EPIC, EPIC game-changer...

7/10

I'm not going to take this opportunity to again rehash the story of the development of this game, there are plenty of articles out there which do that. I'm just going to say that I reached the game, running though my Xbox 360 games alphabetically and playing before selling and I managed approximately an hour of this game, before the wonky control system meant that I decided to give up on it entirely.

As a result of that short play time, I'm not going to write chapter and verse about why the game doesn't work - it may well have clicked after a couple of hours - and I'll just never know. I gave up because I felt I couldn't trust the controller to do what I inputted - and it wasn't the physical controller, that's fine - it's just unresponsive and occasionally contrary coding. Combine that with just bad game design, like some areas where I'm not supposed to fight, and just run, but no real indication when I'm in one of those and, for me, still seeing the glitching Alien's occasionally just standing there for no reason - I decided that enough was more than enough.