Fan Reviews

[OpenMaw]

I thought if they were following the successful Left 4 Dead model so closely that they'd at least take the most impressive part of the entire game: the AI Director.

I thought wrooong Sad fact given that you couldn't find a more fitting game to use an intelligent horde-handling program than Aliens...

Same here, Rage. When I heard they were going for drop-in Co-Op that's exactly what I figured they'd do. Have the AI director in there to see when and where to best drop in aliens, and surprise the players each playthrough.

Bugger.

[Elicas]

Watched the first 45 minutes or so with the Latino sounding fellow playing on youtube

(Leroy712plays) that Ikarop posted in the stickied video thread. He went from jacked up about playing A:CM to sighing with irritation within the first half an hour.

His complaints:

• Dialogue is hammy.
• Textures are exceedingly low resolution.
• Alien Wrastlin'.
• 'Dumb' AI from your squadmates.
• His biggest scare so far was his squadmate warping through his screen from behind.
• Acid is ineffectual.
• Aliens queue up to be shot.
• Less than an hour in and it becomes a generic chest high walls cover shooter versus Weyland mercs.
• There was too much talking and exposition rather than trying to actually get on with surviving in the Hive
• Bodies clipping through floors/walls/doors
• Wey-Yu Marines spawning inside of walls during the second mission
• Squad Mates are completely immune to all non story designated damage
• Super Heavy armour mercs, 5-6 close range shotgun blasts to down them, sort of like the fat guys from Bulletstorm
• Great dialogue like "We'll wait for you son, but don't make us wait for ya!"
• Weyland mercs wearing baseball caps drop Marine helmets when they die
• Armour pickups come as helmets/chest pieces, you can however pick up four helmets in a row and wear them all at once for ultimate realism!
• Blowing the legs off a Xeno, it CANT crawl along the floor at you any more like AVP99 etc.
• In fact, it appears any body damage (legs, arms, feet, etc.) that results in a gib is an instant kill, even though we know in the novelization that the Xeno in Alien loses an arm and is just fine
• AI using consoles - hands hover two to three inches above the console not actually touching it.
• The Bishop model with you knows exactly how long the chestburster takes to mature and what a facehugger looks like after it has laid it's egg. Possible plot device (evil Bishop working for Wey-Yu) or possible oversight in the script
• Bella and Reid bugged and he walked past them while on the mission to look for them
• Alien gibs can get stuck in walls/ceilings, leaving hands, tails, legs and arms sticking out of various surfaces. One hand stuck in the ceiling looked like it was waving at him and freaked him out in the sewer.
• Boilers are rather ridiculous, walking animation makes them look like they've cacked themselves.
• White Husks on the Raven level are supposed to be dead Aliens. They can't be dead from the nuke, because some of them are dead Boilers who are mutated from the nuke, so they must have starved to death. However, some have starved to death mid-roar (Warriors) standing up (Boilers).
• Power Loader boss fight is ridiculously badly animated, it becomes a game of power loader boxing, with a boss who bugs and glitches out mini teleporting around the arena. It's almost like some sort of first person boxing game for the Wii.
• Spitters died very easily doing next to no damage and very inaccurate. They shot at the AI companions more than you, and your companions are immune to damage, making them a bit pointless as enemies.
• Xeno's are immune to damage until 'activated' in game. You can't surprise them at all it seems. Spitters go down to 4-5 pulse rifle bullets, yet he put a whole clip into one on the ceiling and was getting hits (red hit indicators and acid splashes) walked forward a few steps and then it activated and moved off to attack him, dying to one small burst ten seconds later.
• Glitchy Spitters can occasionally shoot through walls.
• Marines are obviously on massive amounts of 'roids, O'Neal kicks down a metal rimmed reinforced glass panel door in one kick, not just opening it but knocking it clear off it's hinges.
• O'Neal and Bella AI glitchess out in the Origin Facility leaving them standing infront of multiple sentry turrets, while playing the wounded animation over and over while immune to the actual bullets.
• Marine walking animations do not actually always contact the ground, several instances in part 14 of O'Neil and Bella hovering two-three feet from the ground.
• Bella conveniently made it just to the operating table before it hatched, where she and O'Neal spend so much time talking and loving it up that he doesn't get to put a bullet in her before it hatches. Presumably this was just to add extra tension but it seems really contrived.
• The face-hugged marines in the Wey-Yu holding labs all had the exact same skin, hair and pose, octuplets!
• Knocking out an APC using a crane requires you to, wait for it... hold down the use button. No interactivity, just hole down the button for awesome!
• Several instances in part 16 of Wey Yu mercs not reacting to an ally dying within a couple of yards of them.
• Hicks being alive, the whole things was f**king stupid to begin with yet alone badly done in game.
• Hicks and Reid dramatically take an APC to escape while you, Cruz and O'Neal remain behind to... go to the same place as Hicks and Reid. Surely we could have shared the same APC, or is this a new two seater model?
• Major bug during part 18 where your allies don't react to the fact you've entered Hadleys, and the mission objective fails to update.
• Marines that you have to save will continue to do the same looped animation and fight off screen xenos indefinitely until you rescue them.
• We leave no marine behind, except for the wounded marines as you re-enter Hadleys and....
• ....for no apparent reason, all the marines you rescue get left behind during the garage defence event and play no further part in the campaign (so far).
• Cruz states repeatedly how many Marines are left active (63 as of part 19) yet you only see eight or so during your missions, where are the rest, and why aren't we grouping up?
• Aliens hit by the flamethrower show blood the same as when they are shot
• The flamethrower fire graphic is much, much worse than AVP10[/lb]
• Aliens on fire stand and pat themselves down trying to put the flames out.
• Controller auto-aim constantly moves towards the targets head, even though there is no hitboxes. (first minute of part 21 shows this best)
• The rocket launcher fires almost as fast as the sniper rifle? How?
• The flamethrower actually fires slightly left of the center of the screen, not bang center.
• On level that are raining, raid continues to fall down your face even when you are underneath cover.
• Queen teleports about the last battle arena.
• Queen fight is absolutely contrived, awful ending.

It wasn't all doom and gloom however, bright points included:

• Fighting the Lurker in the nest was very atmospheric.
• Facehuggers made him shit his little girl panties.
• Weapons sound very good, like being in the film.
• Motion tracker is again, very authentic.
• Body destruction and gibbing is cool
• Raven section was very tense and scared him

[/b]
[/list]

And at the end, a critique of the reviewer:

• He frequently complains that the motion tracker gives an all clear and that enemies then spawn from nowhere. No- they just wern't moving!
• He complains about ammo shortages and armour shortages without picking up all the available pickups, the ones that are flashing blue so you can't miss them!
• He has such awful aiming when shooting down the sights that enemies do more damage to him than he should take, plus the obvious of wasting alot of ammo. I should note that he is playing on the XBOX, and so obviously it's not going to be as easy to aim as on Pc because of console control limitations.
• He is often made to jump by simply not seeing things in front of him, Aliens moving to flank him and in a couple of occaisions marines crouched down behind cover. If he spent an extra second or two looking instead of talking he might have noticed them.
• He frequently complains about viewers complaining that he is critiquing the game too harshly. However this is compounded by the fact he spends much of the review reacting negatively to aspects of the game, before reacting positively to them at a later date. EG: "The game is ugly and the AI is dumb" - "Oh god that's so cool, sometime the game looks really good and the AI isn't so dumb." - "The game is really, really poor." - "The game is pretty decent." - Make up your damn mind!
• How can you get lost so often in a corridor shooter?
• Remarks that the Space Jockey was "that horrible thing from Prometheus, such a bad movie. Well not a bad movie, but I expected more from the guy who brought us Aliens!" Ummm. What?
• He's trying rather hard to be amusing. He isn't.
• He uses the weapons secondary attack maybe half a dozen times during the entire campaign.

[/b]
[/list]


Part 11 just went up. I'll watch the walkthrough online to see just how bad it really is, but I've cancelled my pre-order. It looks so bad as to not even be worth pirating!

The biggest thing I noted, was how the Aliens are reduced to generic Stormtrooper status. According to his score screen on normal, 68 Xeno's down in the first mission. With a two man squad. Yup. 74 Wey-Yu mercs toasted in mission 2, 142 kills within the first hour, authentic yo. I'm actually going to keep a little log in here of how many kills he gets each mission, just so we can see how over the top Gearbox have gone.

1: 68 Xenos
2: 74 Wey-Yu
3: 64 Wey-Yu + Xenos
4: 71 Xenos
5: 62 Xenos
6: 65 Wey-Yu + Xenos (video cuts off before score screen is displayed, average from above levels would be around 65 kills)
7: 67 Wey-Yu + Xenos
8: 87 Wey-Yu + Xenos
9: 65 Xenos (video cuts off before score screen is displayed, average from above levels would be around 65 kills)
10: 96 Wey-Yu + Xenos
11:  Queen - End of Game



Edit: Editted a couple of things, in bold.[/list]

[ShadowPred]

The biggest thing I noted, was how the Aliens are reduced to generic Stormtrooper status. According to his score screen on normal, 68 Xeno's down in the first mission. With a two man squad. Yup.

Good job Gearbox, way to be unique.

[Njm1983]

68 Xeno's down in the first mission.

Good job Gearbox, way to be unique.

They're wall to wall in there...

[OpenMaw]

They're wall to wall in there...

Those guys in Aliens were so whiney. They could have handled the aliens easily if they just walked into the tunnel with their guns ready.

Take em all down.

[The Runner]

The biggest thing I noted, was how the Aliens are reduced to generic Stormtrooper status. According to his score screen on normal, 68 Xeno's down in the first mission. With a two man squad. Yup.

Good job Gearbox, way to be unique.

Pitchford had his hard-on right down the barrel of Hicks shotgun, while oblivious to the obvious threat the xenomorphs were.

[Sully]

I thought I got lucky and bought the game last friday from a shop who clearly had no idea about it's release date, and I have played through the campaign on normal once. And I got bored about halfway through.

The game is buggy, you can walk inside your companions and enemies get stuck. There is a lot of down time waiting for doors to open while your companions chat away. Probably to mask load times, but it's so obvious that it gets old fast.

Ai for both companions and enemies are bad. It just kills the atmosphere when you have your companion and an Alien having a boxing match until you help out. The Aliens aren't very scary since they seem so slow, and if they come to close, as they often will, you'll have to melee them or trow them off with a quick time event. To make matters worse they are badly animated too.

The implementation of the motion tracking sensor doesn't work so well. The screen is too small and the levels dark, so when you finally get yourself orientated the Aliens are on top of you anyway. Just get used to using the shotgun and upgrade all your rifles with one too.

I think the reviews of Aliens: Colonial Marines will probably be about 6-7 on average.

And that is too bad since I had high hopes for this to. But maybe the mp or coop is more fun, but I wouldn't hold my breath...

I was very disappointed at least so I thought I should tell people. The main problem might be that as a sp game this is not very good, or very scary as you'd hope for in a game version of Aliens.

It seems to have been designed around coop and that deflates all tension. Ai companions shout out long before you see Aliens so there isn't really a need for the motion tracker.

I haven't said anything about the story not to spoil anything, but there really isn't much too spoil either as the story is not the main focus at all. You are running from objective to objective in a linear shooting spree that unfortunately reminds me of Cod....

He uploaded videos to prove it;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZB0Rjn9qyM#ws

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GdJhSxK2X8#ws

http://www.ps3trophies.org/forum/aliens-colonial-marines/187966-lower-your-expectations.html

[Dovahkiin]

Watched the first 45 minutes or so with the Latino sounding fellow playing on youtube that Ikarop posted in the stickied video thread. He went from jacked up about playing A:CM to sighing with irritation within the first half an hour.

His complaints:

• Dialogue is hammy.
• Textures are exceedingly low resolution.
• Alien Wrastlin'.
• 'Dumb' AI from your squadmates.
• His biggest scare so far was his squadmate warping through his screen from behind.
• Acid is ineffectual.
• Aliens queue up to be shot.
• Less than an hour in and it becomes a generic chest high walls cover shooter versus Weyland mercs.
• There was too much talking and exposition rather than trying to actually get on with surviving in the Hive

It wasn't all doom and gloom however, bright points included:

• Fighting the Lurker in the nest was very atmospheric.
• Facehuggers made him shit his little girl panties.
• Weapons sound very good, like being in the film.
• Motion tracker is again, very authentic.

That was about it before part 3 finished, part 4 isn't uploaded yet. I'll watch the walkthrough online to see just how bad it really is, but I've cancelled my pre-order. It looks so bad as to not even be worth pirating!

The biggest thing I noted, was how the Aliens are reduced to generic Stormtrooper status. According to his score screen on normal, 68 Xeno's down in the first mission. With a two man squad. Yup.

Extremely disappointing to read. It was the same way with the marine campaign in AVP2010. There's still hope for multiplayer, though...

[Elicas]

 Amended my post, having found part 4. Added his new complaints to the list, no new plus points though

[ShadowPred]

Watched the first 45 minutes or so with the Latino sounding fellow playing on youtube that Ikarop posted in the stickied video thread. He went from jacked up about playing A:CM to sighing with irritation within the first half an hour.

His complaints:

• Dialogue is hammy.
• Textures are exceedingly low resolution.
• Alien Wrastlin'.
• 'Dumb' AI from your squadmates.
• His biggest scare so far was his squadmate warping through his screen from behind.
• Acid is ineffectual.
• Aliens queue up to be shot.
• Less than an hour in and it becomes a generic chest high walls cover shooter versus Weyland mercs.
• There was too much talking and exposition rather than trying to actually get on with surviving in the Hive

It wasn't all doom and gloom however, bright points included:

• Fighting the Lurker in the nest was very atmospheric.
• Facehuggers made him shit his little girl panties.
• Weapons sound very good, like being in the film.
• Motion tracker is again, very authentic.

That was about it before part 3 finished, part 4 isn't uploaded yet. I'll watch the walkthrough online to see just how bad it really is, but I've cancelled my pre-order. It looks so bad as to not even be worth pirating!

The biggest thing I noted, was how the Aliens are reduced to generic Stormtrooper status. According to his score screen on normal, 68 Xeno's down in the first mission. With a two man squad. Yup.

Extremely disappointing to read. It was the same way with the marine campaign in AVP2010. There's still hope for multiplayer, though...

I think it says something that I found the live stream portions of the multi-player to actually be more fun than the campaign we saw. Looks like actually playing the campaign will be as shit as it was in AvP 2010.


Lol, just saw the edited post of the pros and cons...142 kills in the first hour...with two Marines...brilliant, just f**king brilliant.

[ShadowPred]

I thought I got lucky and bought the game last friday from a shop who clearly had no idea about it's release date, and I have played through the campaign on normal once. And I got bored about halfway through.

The game is buggy, you can walk inside your companions and enemies get stuck. There is a lot of down time waiting for doors to open while your companions chat away. Probably to mask load times, but it's so obvious that it gets old fast.

Ai for both companions and enemies are bad. It just kills the atmosphere when you have your companion and an Alien having a boxing match until you help out. The Aliens aren't very scary since they seem so slow, and if they come to close, as they often will, you'll have to melee them or trow them off with a quick time event. To make matters worse they are badly animated too.

The implementation of the motion tracking sensor doesn't work so well. The screen is too small and the levels dark, so when you finally get yourself orientated the Aliens are on top of you anyway. Just get used to using the shotgun and upgrade all your rifles with one too.

I think the reviews of Aliens: Colonial Marines will probably be about 6-7 on average.

And that is too bad since I had high hopes for this to. But maybe the mp or coop is more fun, but I wouldn't hold my breath...

I was very disappointed at least so I thought I should tell people. The main problem might be that as a sp game this is not very good, or very scary as you'd hope for in a game version of Aliens.

It seems to have been designed around coop and that deflates all tension. Ai companions shout out long before you see Aliens so there isn't really a need for the motion tracker.

I haven't said anything about the story not to spoil anything, but there really isn't much too spoil either as the story is not the main focus at all. You are running from objective to objective in a linear shooting spree that unfortunately reminds me of Cod....

He uploaded videos to prove it;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZB0Rjn9qyM#ws

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GdJhSxK2X8#ws

http://www.ps3trophies.org/forum/aliens-colonial-marines/187966-lower-your-expectations.html

Yep...this pretty much settles it for me. As I said before, I am definitely going to buy this game for very cheap, and used.

[RagingDragon]

Despite my horrendous disappointment, this whole page had me laughing freaking hard.

I guess I haven't been keeping up on current events, but that first video... he straight rubs on that Alien's face around the 3:30 mark. He rubs it, all up on it man! Why does this have to happen?

The only people to ever rub an Alien's face have had theirs almost immediately eaten. But of course, the Alien has to hiss and scream for no real purpose instead of attack, like an angered but not very dangerous dog.

And that's how they begin the game? With a good Alien face grope? God help us.

They wag their tails too. Watch as the first alien jumps down from the wall. His tail sure is a'waggin (because he knows he's about to get cuddles on his face.)

Just like Avpaliens... These are just Anderson AvP aliens, that's what they forgot to mention. The game is now great.

[PRI. HUDSON]

Short review from a woman who is from England I believe. She gave it an 8 outta 10.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/columnist/2013/02/08/cheryl-mullin-aliens-colonial-marines-100252-32768147/

[Giger_Incubator]

So Dog Alien confirmed then? I had hoped so, even assumed, but never heard confirmation from anyone. Best news so far, easily.

[DiabloGuapo]

Based on the videos that I've seen, I like it and I'm still looking forward to playing it. Is it perfect? No, but it still looks fun. It looks no worse than AvP2010, and believe it or not, I like that game. Hammy dialoge, so what. It's no worse than any other FPS. The graphics look fine to me, then again I'm not too picky. Sure, the Alien AI could be more stealthy and acid could do more damage, but the game has to be playable. Could you imagine trying to survive a xenomorph encounter if they were like the ones from the movies? You'll never be able to get pass the first level. I think everyone set their expectations too high and are being too hard on it. I know it's been hyped up about being a "canon" game, but remember that it's a game first and foremost. I think fans would find something to complain about regardless of what's in it. Remember, it's just a game, have fun with it.