Aliens: Colonial Marines

There are some feelings of nostalgia to be enjoyed, but it soon wears off and all that is left is some bog standard run ‘n’ gun action that brings little of note to the FPS table - and it suffers from a severe lack of optimisation on PS3 and 360.

And that's Colonial Marines' biggest problem: enemies come, and you shoot them down easily, again and again. The game is remarkably light on variety. A couple of battles masquerade as boss fights, but they require no strategy and are just as easy and thrill-less as the rest. The four- to five-hour campaign has no thrust to it; it feels the same from beginning to end, and the finale just drops with a thud. And by being so easy and predictable, the game lets down the license.

Fundamentally, it is flawed with poor design and weak content. Colonial Marines feels dated, and fails to capture any essence of what an Alien game should be. Though Aliens: Colonial Marines has been crafted with the fans in mind, it just needed a stronger approach in its design, accompanied by some serious polish.

There was a lot of hope for Aliens: Colonial Marines but it seems the gaming world is let down with another attempt to make a successful film tie in. The review should give you a few good reasons why the game suffers but other aspects such as the overused catchphrase ‘Stay frosty!’ and anticlimactic ending are a couple more to add to the list and this is why you should wait until this game gets thrown into the bargain bin before you purchase.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is both disappointing and sad. The plot plays out like a bad fan-made film with unintentionally bad acting and ties to familiar things because it didn't have any original ideas. The gameplay feels dated and out of step with the evolution of the shooter. Bugs are rampant throughout the title, and the game lacks a level of polish that was expected during the first year of this console generation.

Overall the game is a big disappointment - often frustrating, dated and has little in the way of reward or replay value.

You know how some games are so bad, they’re actually fun to play? Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t one of those games. It’s just bad.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a slap in the face to anyone who put the game on their Most Wanted list at any point since 2007. It’ll be remembered for a long time, but for all the wrong reasons. What a shame. I just feel sorry for those who bought the Season Pass… since there probably won’t be a Season now.

Building a game around James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi classic should be the recipe for a tense, action-packed shooter bursting with atmosphere and scares. Instead we get one of the biggest disappointments in recent years. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a shameful, at times broken, and consistently woeful waste of potential.

Take away the Aliens license, and you’ve got a shooter that has no reason to exist.

The failure of Aliens: Colonial Marines runs deeper than a clumsy stab at sliding into the Alien canon, though. It’s not just a poor Aliens experience, it’s a poor game. There’s a stiffness to the movement and a lack of feedback to the vanilla weapon line-up that’s unexpected from Gearbox Software.

Certainly, many of Colonial Marines’ flaws could have been excusable back in the early days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but now, when every title is polished to a near excruciating level of quality, it just doesn’t cut it.

Repetitive gameplay, plenty of bugs and bad graphics. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a bad game, a really bad one.

I would definitely suggest avoiding Aliens: Colonial Marines entirely or at least just rent it if you feel like you need to experience it yourself. Certainly don’t buy it.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a poor game made worse by the extensive hype that the game mustered over its six year development.

As a fan of the series, the game was horrible to play, and this review was heart-breaking to write. For purely sentimental reasons, this was one of the games that fans would have been desperate to see succeed. Somewhere along the line, we were all let down. What makes it worse are the occasional flashes of a good game that flash through.

Aliens Colonial Marines is old-school, that's for sure. A little bit too much so, unfortunately. With three different developers and a several year delay, it was predictable... Graphs from 2005, AI from 1895 and poor story writing amount to a too-heavy burden. And you can't even compensate for that by being highly loyal to the movies. This game is just a waste - of time for the studios, of money for you.

It makes me wonder: did Gearbox actually sit down and watch the Alien movies?

Even if it were polished to an acceptable, 2013-standard AAA shine, Colonial Marines would still only be a generic effort coasting on borrowed iconography. Weighed down by so many grindingly obvious mechanical issues, it never even gets off the ground. For a game all about exterminating bugs, it's a fatal irony.

I'm not that witty, but I am pretty vulgar—as a result, all I can say is that if Aliens: Colonial Marines had been fished out of a Marine's colon during emergency surgery it wouldn't surprise me in the least.