Aliens: Colonial Marines

Hard core fans like me… will of course soldier along with the game and hope for the best and hope that tweaks to the game will make it better. It has some playing value, though you really have to push yourself to those points of the game. I like the game…it’s just a hard sell really, a love hate kind of thing of a big fan of the franchise….Nagging in the back of my brain is the thought that in this game, no one can hear you scream, and there will be no rescue ship sent.

With its annoying bugs, dated graphics and atmosphere of the film recreated only in certain situations, Alien Colonial Marines misses the target, disregarding the very high expectations of fans. Nevertheless, the narrative directly integrated with the movie franchise, the presence of twists, easter eggs and a multiplayer alternative to the usual FPS make it an interesting product for those who love the saga and the scary creature designed by Geiger. If you like Xenomorphs and you can go over on an atmosphere unable to strike fear (Dead Space is on another planet) and to the technical sector, you can give it a chance.

It's a very generic shooter, which seems to be one of the games we saw at the beginning at the generation or the end of the previous one. Certainly disappointing, there's a game here with several technical issues that still manages to be moderately fun.

Judging by the result, Gearbox could not handle the tremendous success of Borderlands 2. On the other hand, there’s this erroneous notion that franchises can exploit their name and are justified to produce mediocre titles for ever. Those two facts were enough to condemn Aliens: Colonial Marines. While it’s true that the console version is even worse, the competition in the PC shooter genre, is relentless. [April 2013]

Not as bad as the wost Aliens games, yet it's also not in the same league as the very best, leaving ACM to meandering in the space system of mediocrity. [Apr 2013, p.69]

A fair shooter that's been lifted among the above-average titles by its impressive background and several action scenes. This is an outstanding tour for the Aliens (even Alien) fans; for the other gamers it's slightly problematic, still quite a tasty canapé.

Colonial Marines comes off as too much fan service with few (if any) ideas of its own. It provides a tired narrative with an unsatisfactory conclusion that opens more questions than it attempts to answer.

A decent game that could have been much better with just a few vital improvements. Gearbox has wasted much of the enormous potential of the franchise, and as a result the game is enjoyable almost exclusively in the multiplayer modes and not more than a single play-through of the Campaign.

Despite the game’s best intentions to immerse you in the Aliens universe, the result is a bloody massacre. Relying on dated storytelling techniques and technology, and stretching way too far to provide a plausible link between the second and third films, Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t able to connect its action to any real sense of drama or terror, completely missing the aspect of psychological horror that gave the film its edge.

Such small inconsistencies fade before an embarrassing overall picture that Colonial Marines delivers: an ugly, poorly voiced and narrated lousy 0815-shooter.

If only Aliens: Colonial Marines had decent visuals, the score would also have been able to pass mark. Instead, due to the mediocre technical sector, the too-short single-player Campaign, questionable A.I. and the uninspired and bland narrative, the long=awaited return of Xenomorphs became, in the hands of Gearbox Software, something very close to a complete failure.

A lot of potential with disappointing execution. [March 2013, p.86]

Aliens in Colonial Marines fail to scare you. Instead they make you laugh at their awkwardness and grotesque animations. The whole game is riddled with bugs and I honestly can’t remember any title with dumber AI controlled squad members. Sadly it seems that Gearbox is unable to make an ordinary first person shooters any more. [CD-Action 03/2013, p.54]

The saddest thing is there’s still a lot of fun to be found in Colonial Marines. As much as I loathed it at times, this was mostly due to the fact that when the game gets it right, it really gets it right. Last-gen graphics, poor quality control and sloppy writing further taint an enjoyable co-op experience that otherwise goes a long way to making the player fe