Kiiiiill...Meeeeee....

As Mr. Sloman always says, there is no “I” in team, but there is an “I” in pie. And there’s an “i” in meat pie. Meat is the anagram of team… I don’t know what he’s talking about. What I do know is that there’s also an “I” in “stupid”, and your teammates in Aliens: Colonial Marines are the biggest, most selfish bunch of moronic bastards I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing with. Welcome to another review from the broken controller club, my name’s Ed. Continuing through what I’ve dubbed “Bad Game Summer”, an event that I made up and am increasingly regretting, today I’m talking about the gaming abortion that is Aliens: Colonial Marines. Most of the bad games I’m reviewing seem to be getting worse than the last – I feel like Dante visiting the circles of Hell in Inferno.

So this game has a reputation, just like my recently reviewed Duke Nukem Forever, to have gone through multiple developers while also still having Gearbox’s name slapped on the label. Sega gave Gearbox the freedom to write and design the game like they wanted, and having a lot of Aliens fans on staff certainly didn’t hurt. To help with authenticity they even hired visual futurist Syd Mead, who helped design movies like Aliens, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, and a lot more movies that you’re probably familiar with. It appeared that the intentions were there to make a great, loyal Aliens experience, however as many of us functioning adults know, your intentions don’t count for a whole lot and people will be paying attention to what the actual outcome is.

Colonial Marines was originally supposed to be a squad-based shooter. Gearbox was riding the wave of success that came with Borderlands and started working on Borderlands 2, and outsourced Colonial Marines to Timegate Studios. While this was going on, apparently Sega wanted the game to have more human enemies in it and less Aliens, which was obviously stupid because it’s not called “Humans: Colonial Marines”. Cue a bunch of delays and Gearbox having to fix what was there, and I use that word loosely, because what Timegate left them wasn’t able to run on on the PS3, and the game released February of 2013. For reference it was announced in 2008.

Storywise, the game’s considered canon as it takes place between Aliens and Alien 3 and fills in some of the details on what happened, almost like a story that runs parallel to them. You won’t see Ripley in this, obviously, because she’s off on her own miserable journey that should never have happened. You *will* however see Hicks, another Bishop, and what’s left of Hudson, though. You play as Corporal Winter, who is part of a group of marines tasked with rescuing survivors from the Sulaco spaceship. Things go awry because of the alien infestation there, and that takes them from the Sulaco back to Hadley’s Hope on planet LV-426, which was the setting from Aliens.

So now that we know Aliens was supposed to be squad based, how’d it end up? Like corn-riddled shit, that’s how. It’s 7 to 10 hours of shooting aliens and occasionally other humans while looking at the same low-res corridors, caves, ship interiors, and weird HR Giger alien decorating. The graphics remind me of instagram influencers – they look terrible up close and no matter what angle you’re seeing them from, all you see is ass. It’s actually a blessing in disguise that this game is so dark because in their defense, you can only make pipes and boxes so interesting.

AI teammates are the same way. At first I thought they looked alright, but after you’re in better lit areas they look pretty terrible. Bishop and Hicks look kinda-sorta like the actors, and when I found Hudson’s corpse I could tell it was him. I don’t know, he had Bill Paxton-ish qualities. As a side note, Hudson’s apparent death by chest-burster in this seems like BS considering he was last seen pulled through the floor by xenomorphs. I can’t imagine that at that point, they would’ve kept him around long enough to stick a facehugger on him and leave him. That’s just me. If you have a different theory let me know in the comments.

The xenomorphs mostly look like their movie versions, though there’s not much variety to them. You’ve got your standard aliens, there’s also some that spit acid at you, there’s the requisite queen, and also these hilariously stupid ones in the sewers that only react to sound. If they hear you they come shuffling over and get in your face, which I guess is supposed to be creepy but was more funny than anything else. Like these ones – I feel like they’re going to sell me something. “Hello, we’re from the government’s ministry of truth and heard you haven’t had your covid vaccine yet. You’re not willingly reading…MISINFORMATION on social media are you??”

Shooting any of these idiots looks like they’re splattered in neon paintballs and when they die they just wilt and fall over, I can’t explain why but they looked sad when they died. Also from far away they just look like stick figures. There’s no dread in encountering them like in the movies. The queen is huge but then she went from being a novelty to being used in these movies so many times now that the thrill of seeing her is gone, kinda like seeing any terminators in movies after T2.

There’s a decent amount of weapons to choose from, and you get to choose a primary and secondary weapon along with grenades and pistol. Unfortunately, and this is easy the most irritating part of the combat – the guns are horribly innacurate, especially the rifles.

The sound in general is mixed poorly, especially for voices. The cutscenese are mostly audible, but when playing the actual game, any chatter between the characters is really quiet on default and it sounds more like bitchy muttering. The actual voice acting is fine, though. Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen both sound great and this isn’t surprising because let’s be honest, Michael Biehn is amazing in everything he’s in. He’s the once and future Kyle Reese. Also if you haven’t played Far Cry Blood Dragon, you need to immediately buy that after this video is finished. Anyways, I got sidetracked. When you’re not feeling like you’re deaf and trying to hear what they’re saying, you just hear your pulse rifle. Then you hear other human enemies with their pulse rifles. And then you hear the other marines with their pulse rifles. So yeah, I got really sick of pulse rifles by the end of this.

The gameplay is pretty awful, and that’s even after the patching they’ve done. You basically go in a linear path, shoot some aliens or humans, move forward a little, do it again, and then repeat that for the whole game. You can spring but that’s the worst thing you can possibly do because whenever you think the enemies are done attacking, more will show up out of nowhere, so there’s lots of inching forward. If it sounds tedious, it’s because it is. Checkpoints aren’t as common as I would’ve liked so getting killed at some parts would require me to play entire sections again. That’s not so much of a problem if I like the game, but having that happen in this was pretty painful.

What’s probably the 2nd most irritating part of the combat are the aliens. Simply put, they’re retarded, and just rush you. Like, constantly. I’d say 90% of the fights I was in, they would ignore the other marines and make a beeline for me. Other times they run off and hide for a moment and then come back out, or they’d just sit there like they’re squatting to drop a deuce. one time they jumped me and I had to mash square to get him off, then he backed up, turned his back to me, and then I shot him until he died. It was like he got discouraged and started sulking.

Your teammates are unbelievably stupid and rarely help you when you need it. A lot of times I felt like they were setting me up to die. Like they’ll either sit there and just watch the door to the next area, or once you kill everything, they’ll turn around and shoot at something, like they were pretending to help out. At one point, my teammate goes “I’ve got you covered” and he let me get killed almost immediately. Other fun things they like to do are standing in front of you constantly. They also like to crowd doorways and not only force you to open most of the doors and get shot at first (as if the enemies go for anybody else anyway), but they also hog all the corners, so you can rarely take cover to hide from enemy gunfire. Why do they need cover if everything skips them and goes straight for me anyway? I have to mention that the cover only helps a portion of the time anyway because human enemies will shoot you through it. It was huge fun to find that out and didn’t make me swear at all.

There’s a decent amount of weapons to choose from, and you get to choose a primary and secondary weapon along with grenades and pistol. Unfortunately, and this is easy the most irritating part of the combat – the guns are horribly innacurate, especially the rifles. Aiming down sites shows the red dot swaying to extremes that feel like your character is really drunk or aiming for a fly buzzing around. Shotguns are the most effective weapons to avoid aiming, but then they’re only for close range so they’re useless against human enemies. Also the vertical accuracy of rifles is bad, with the climb being really severe when firing. In fact you don’t get a weapon that can aim competently until you unlock the Battle Rifle later on, and with that you can snipe enemies from far away. Until then you might as well just hip fire everything that comes at you, as aiming down a scope leaves your peripherals so vulnerable that aliens will coming in and kill you before you realize where the damage is coming from.

Weapon unlocks in this game are done by leveling up and with each level comes a special point you can use to unlock various add-ons for your weapons. The vast majority of unlocks are new sites, which as I just mentioned don’t help because the aiming is already badger shit, but some others are new skins or alternate ammunition like flame rounds or grenades. You can also find “legendary” weapons like Hicks’ shotgun, Hudson’s pulse rifle, stuff like that. I thought this was really funny because I don’t know how legendary you can be considered if you’re one of the many marines in Aliens to get snuffed out pretty effortlessly.

If this still sounds like a lot of fun to you, then please know that the fun doesn’t stop there, as there’s bugs a plenty in this! Granted they’re mostly visual bugs and don’t really affect the gameplay. Plenty of times I’d shoot an enemy and they’d just explode, even with normal bullets. Once I killed an enemy soldier and he turned into ammo, like his body just disappeared. Some of the aliens would disappear immediately when I killed them as well. There was one time, and I regret that I didn’t get this recorded, but I killed an alien and while the rest of the game was running fine, I had blown the bottom half of his body off and the remaining top half was falling to the ground in what I can only describe as slow motion, maybe 1/4th of the normal speed of the game. It was hilarious and I couldn’t get it to happen again. I also found out the hard way that when tutorial prompts came up, that they didn’t pause the game and you could still get killed while reading them.

So what did I like in this? Well, it had a hell of a lot more action than Duke Nukem so I was happy about that. Also there’s a lot of times in this game where you’ll have to operate machinery or use a torch to cut open a locked door, and you don’t have to do anything but hit the action button. No rapid tapping, no weird analog crap, no hacking puzzles, you just hit a button and they do it for you.

Also the story doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to bring back Hicks and Bishop, and honestly that was good enough for me. It sucked not seeing Ripley, but Hicks also got screwed pretty badly in Alien 3 and this game’s story actually explains what happened and why he’s back. The rest of the crew has zero personality and there’s one chick named Bella who you meet and she talks about a face hugger getting on her. You can take a wild guess what happens later *bella death scene*. Other than her, though, the body count is kept extremely low through the whole game.

So with all of that said – I have finally arrived at my verdict, which is that this game has a passable story, if only because of Hicks and Bishop returning. Otherwise Aliens: Colonial Marines is a mess even after being patched, with ugly graphics, lots of graphical bugs, guns that can’t shoot the broadside of a barn or however that saying goes, and enemies that completely ignore your braindead teammates and only go for you. It is a frustrating experience and now that I’ve beaten it, I don’t ever want to play it again, not even on a dare.