Late to the Party – Aliens: Colonial Marines

Don’t let them fool you…your teammates are better at shooting YOU than the enemy.

There was initially a lot of hype over this game, and for good reason. Gearbox, who in my opinion is either hit or miss with games, had been pretty hard up for making this title since Tyrus had told me after the release of band of brothers Hells highway. The developer commentaries and the fact that everyone was supposedly huge aliens fans at gearbox got me psyched. I loved the first three alien movies (Resurrection is a piece of dog shit, Joss Wiedon, WTF?!) and consider myself a huge fan of those films(the AVP movies can also go suck an ass). So naturally when I heard huge fans were making a game for huge fans, well, I was pretty psyched. Reality and expectations seldom match up….Buckle up, this is gonna’ get ugly….

So, the meat and potatoes, let’s dig in!

What’s good about this game? Well shit, that’s a hard question to answer, and one I really need to ponder. I suppose I did like the shotgun, however, even with the damage upgrade it wasn’t where it needed to be.

What sucks about this game? There’s a laundry list, but I’ll try and stick to the most egregious offenders.

First off the game-play is shit. The controls blow. For example, having the motion tracker up is beyond useless most of the time. The developers foolishly wanted to scare the audience, using overpowering loud noises that deafen the player (and quiet audio when cut scenes take place) and blips that you can’t shoot on the tracker tend to appear for “dramatic effect”. What you get is a useless tracker 50% of the time, it could be a xenomorph, or a poorly contrived ploy to make eight year cry for Halo 4.

Oh, THERE they are! Thanks motion tracker…

The weapon switching system is also garbage. You have to hold the “Y” button on the 360 version to change weapons where you select from a wheel. Seems basic enough, and you can assign weapons to the “D” pad for quick use sort of like borderlands. Problem is most of the time I had to keep my cursor held over the selected weapon for some time to get it equipped, or the analog stick would slip because I’m being mauled by a fucking alien. Sometimes it worked on demand, others, I was killed by xenos. It was beyond frustrating to be sitting around trying ot change your pulse rifle for the battle rifle to kill Yutani mercs when they want to run up to you and instantly kill you.

Which brings up another point, the game is called fucking “Aliens”, not “Mercs”. Although you do fight slews of xenos, mercenaries are overabundant, and incredibly hard to kill. They soak up damage like sponges and deal it like nobody’s business Worse yet the developers chose to dumb down the epic 99 round pulse rifle mag to a measly 60, and that’s when upgraded. The rifle is already dumbed down on damage (not like we see in the movie, where xenos pop when hit with the 10mm case-less exploding rounds) and the Yutani mercs laugh it off, thus the use of the sniper rifle, my bad, battle rifle. The damn thing is a sniper rifle and you can’t remove or replace the scope, which makes it utterly impractical for fighting xenos (who come up-close and personal)

Fucking Mercs…

And the resawns also suck huge ass. When you die in co-op (If you haven’t noticed I tend to play a lot of co-op games with my best friend which harkins back to my youth when I’d play with my older brother so he wouldn’t murder me in death match) it takes forever to re-spawn. Checkpoints are distantly spaced, and even outside of combat when your teammate is wandering the halls groaning at dramatic effect motion tracker blips, all you can do is wait. It’s utterly horrid.

Ammunition is also an issue. Instead of having all the rifles have standard ammunition, each one has it’s own. That shotgun you selected to put under your assault rifle instead of the flamethrower as the secondary fire (which has literally no range, and the odd tendency to shoot to the left much like the special primary weapon version of the flamethrower)? Bad news, it fires “special” shotgun rounds that don’t do any more noticeable damage regular rounds from the regular shotgun. WTF? Further more the “Legendary” weapons have their own ammunition, and no, it isn’t any better than the regular ammo. WTF is a legendary weapon? A weapon from the movie that was added as something of a collectible, but doesn’t seem to be much better than the regular guns (though we never found Hudson’s pulse rifle or Vasquez’s smart gun, only every other gun), and oh, you can’t upgrade them! >=p

I found out the hard way that they stopped giving me assault rifle ammo (not pulse rifle, it’s another gun entirely with a 3 shot burst. I upgraded it’s damage at the cost of accuracy, making it something of a shotgun, which was ok because I mainly used the shoty any way) half way through the game. Also, you don’t get full ammo after each mission, or special ammo. Yet another problem, those aforementioned under slung shotguns? They take special ammo. Every gun has special ammo, most of the time only mercs drop it, but in all likelihood you wont use them much. Those bad ass grenades on the bottom of your M41A1 pulse rifle, well they have no splash damage just about, and you seldom kill more than 2 aliens with them. Remember those small but insanely bad ass hand grenades the marines have in the the movie? The one Gorman uses to blow up himself and Vasquez to hell? The ones that knock newt down an air-shaft and nearly knock Ripley over? Same deal, no splash damage, little damage, mostly useless, and certainly not worth risking a fuck up on the weapon wheel. You don’t want to accidentally take out a piece of shit like the tactical shotgun (it’s semi-auto, weaker, and reloads slower. A.k.a. Sucks ass).

An annoying, cliche’ teammate dies…how tragic…..

Story. Yep, also garbage. Predictable, linear, boring. Charters are insipid, cliche’ and the plot twist predictable. Spoiler alert, Corporal Dwayne Hicks didn’t die on Fury in Alien’s 3. Yutani kidnapped him, replaced his body with a clone or some shit then tortured him to find out what happened on LV-426.

Bottom Line