Aliens Colonial Marines Review

Let’s talk about one of my biggest irritations with the game: The cutscenes . They are absolutely abysmal. The lip sync is completely out and the facial animations and expressions are completely void. There is no emotion evident and it really pulls you out of the experience.

There’s some replayability incentive in the collection of dogtags, legendary weapons and audio logs. The dogtags are just a collectable that unlocks an achievement, all featuring names of characters from the movie or people who worked on the game.

The audio logs add some depth to the story (also adding to the confusing mess of the story) and are voiced by different characters and different actors. Collecting them all also unlocks an achievement. The more fun unlockables are the “legendary weapons”. These are supposed to be the weapons used by the characters from Aliens.

You can find Hicks’ shotgun, Hudson’s pulse rifle, Frost’s flamethrower, Vasquez’s pistol, Gorman’s pistol, Drake’s smartgun.  Some of these feature personalization not actually featured in the film (Hicks’ stencils on the shotgun and Hudson’s rifle firing bursts) might irk some of the stricter fans.

I’ve seen others criticise the game due to its length. I played through the game on the 3rd difficulty, initially and it probably took me around 6-7 hours to complete. This is pretty average for most games these days so I can’t really pin that as a major flaw of the game. The game isn’t very difficult, even on the hardest (Ultimate Badass) difficulty which can contribute to the short length.

“I’m A Badass!”

Multiplayer is the game’s saving grace. What I primarily wanted from Colonial Marines was an updated FPS experience. Having been spoiled with the likes of Battlefield 3, I was looking forward to customization, to multiplayer progression and a current game-style.

To a small degree Colonial Marine does offer this. Whilst not as immersive or massive as Battlefield 3 (I’m still unlocking items in that game!), we’re offered customisation that is unlocked through ranking up and completion of challenges. The majority of the weapon customisation can be unlocked via playing the single player campaign (you rank up in that) and by finding the Legendary Weapons.

Your Colonial Marines’ appearance is completely customisable and you can select camouflage, armour graffiti, body appearance and etc. Your Alien character’s abilities and appearance is also customizable with all their abilities being unlocked by completing challenges and ranking up in multiplayer.

The game ships with 4 game-modes and a decent selection of maps. All these maps are larger environment with smaller locations within each, offering a variety of gameplay styles. I’m disappointed that the game didn’t ship with a skirmish mode, instead opting to release it as downloadable content instead. This kind of business ploy can often be disenchanting for players.

Multiplayer is immensely fun when playing with a party. The high points of your games come when communicating with your team – trying to setup ambushes as Aliens and coordinating your defences as a marine. Especially in the team based modes such as Escape or Survivor. These game modes really resonate with the feeling of Aliens as you battle your way from point to point in Escape or make your last stand in Survivor.

But it also suffers from many of the same issues that the single player does with texture popping, graphics that don’t stand up to Alien vs Predator (2010)’s beautiful multiplayer locations, laughable animations and numerous bugs.

A big complaint from players is in how the Alien character handles and I can definitely understand that. Whilst I think that the decision to switch the camera to 3rd person is good in theory, the transitions between surfaces are very clunky and it is impossible to move with the speed and efficiency of the Alien in Rebellion’s flawed AvP.

I really love the multiplayer, despite the flaws. I would love to see the bugs fixed and gameplay improved. I’m hoping the DLC will continue to provide more maps – Escape and Survivor only have 2 apiece at the minute and they are easily the highlights of the current game modes but variety will be needed to keep the fun. I’d love to finally get to have a multiplayer map set aboard the Derelict.

Further customisation would be amazing too. Further weapon skins and maybe more unlockables such as different sights would really help deepen that immersion.

The co-op feature of Aliens: Colonial Marines were often spoken about and billed as an important selling point of the game. It features 4-player drop-in and out co-op. It’s fun – but for most of the wrong reasons.

I played through the co-op campaign in a handful of hours with fellow staffer RidgeTop and a forum member. It was enjoyable but I think more for the banter and mocking of the game. You could argue that the co-op experience is always made by the people you’re playing with. The co-op obviously suffers through all the same issues that the campaign does but it’s just so fun to be able to mess around with friends.

It’s definitely not the defining feature that Gearbox was selling it to be.

“That’s A Long Story…”

Like I mentioned earlier, the multiplayer finally brings us a modern gameplay style that gels well with other FPS titles currently out. This style is obviously maintained within the single player campaign too.

The customisation of weaponry is also featured across the game allowing you to use the same setups in single player. For the first time in an Aliens game we’re looking down iron-sights, we’re customising our underslung addition (I do love the underslung grenade launcher on my pulse rifle!) and we’re picking the logo splattered across our armour. These bits are fun. I’m really happy that the modern gameplay mechanics work so well with the franchise.

I really enjoyed taking the motion tracker off the HUD too. Traditionally it has always been incorporated directly into the HUD but bringing it off the HUD and making it an additional item that you carry and have to bring up at the expense of your weapon really adds to the immersion of the game. It’s especially fun in multiplayer with relaying the direction and distance to your team-mates.

Graphically the game is very subpar. It can’t even begin to match the beauty of Rebellion’s Aliens vs. Predator which was released 3 years ago. I know that the X-Box is coming towards the end of its lifespan but with Halo 4 demonstrating that the console is still capable of providing beautiful, epic sceneries there’s really not much excuse as to why Aliens: Colonial Marines looks so bad.

I won’t get into the whole scandal of the E3 demo vs the final product but Colonial Marines seems to boast none of the fantastic lighting effects and detailed scenery that was promised.

The texture popping was very noticeable too. I’m used to games taking a short time to load the textures (Battlefield 3) but it is noticeably long in Colonial Marines and I found it very irritating.

Sound-wise the game is fantastic. Kevin Riepl’s score is very brilliant and accompanies the series really well. Despite the odd use of some of the Alien Resurrection theme for the main menu track, Riepl brings in a large amount of brass military bravado to the score making it feel just like a Colonial Marines game should. I know Sega wants to release the soundtrack and I’d really like to see that happen as I would snap that up.

Gearbox/Timegate had access to some of Fox’s Aliens resources and this carries over into the sound effects within the game. The pulse rifle sounds like it did in the film and the heart-beat tone of the motion tracker is also there. I don’t think I could possibly pick a single fault with the sound aspect of the game.