Aliens: Colonial Marine
Producer: Sega
Release Date: February 12, 2013
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Rating: Mature
Genre: First-person shooter
You’re Dogmeat, Pal
Written by Josh Schilling
Frankly, I don’t understand all of the negativity being dealt out to Aliens: Colonial Marines. This newest release from Gearbox, the developer that brought you Borderlands and its sequel, isn’t a perfect game by a long shot, but is it really as bad as they say? Sure the titular xenomorphs that you gun down by the hundreds are clunky, unintelligent, and more comical than scary. Sure the graphic quality of the cut-scenes looks like something we’d have seen on an original PlayStation. Sure the story that’s supposed to be canon to the “Alien” universe is jaw-dropping not in its revelation, but in its awkwardness. Could a game that took seven years to develop really be such a humongous disaster? I dug deep…extremely deep…to unearth the positive aspects of this game, and after a long and tenuous search, I think that I might have pulled out a couple.
I am a huge fan of the movie “Aliens” by James Cameron. When news of Aliens: Colonial Marines first arrived and it was revealed that I would be able to follow in the footsteps of that doomed platoon of space marines, I was genuinely excited. Once I was finally able to play it, the familiar sounds and locations that I initially experienced felt comfortable in a retrospective kind of way. The pattering noise of the pulse rifle was especially fun to control, and the initial waves of aliens were turned joyfully into a splatter of green. From there the smiles faded…mostly. It turns out that the noise from the pulse rifle gets annoying after about five minutes and the aliens are nothing more than cheap facsimiles of their terrifying movie counterparts. In fact the whole nostalgia of this game gets completely smothered by the dominating forces of poor craftsmanship and a pieced-together script. I can only imagine some poor guy never seen the movie buying this game, playing it and then hurling expletives along with his controller at his innocent television screen. At least I was able to say that I had enjoyed some of this in a movie once.
I do see how this game could have some value, however, because it leaves an extremely strong impression. It is so bad that it is somewhat entertaining. I will always remember the stupid explanation as to how a survivor from the movie ended up in the game. I will laugh as I recall how the blind sewer aliens failed to see me as they walked past me and then casually stroll down a flight of stairs. I will wince as I remember feeling like I was playing Rock ’em Sock ‘em Robots, rather than experiencing an accurate representation of the iconic power loader scene from the end of my beloved movie. Yes this game is bad, but it is so bad that it is funny. It is like we now know how Aliens would have looked if Uwe Boll had got his dirty mitts on that script. You get shocked by the obvious mistakes and then you laugh at how someone could have felt that it was a good decision to release it to the public. Just add this one to the long list of movie/game tie-in fails.