Aliens: Colonial Marines

The abysmal graphics and bland shooting make this game a gigantic disappointment, especially if you consider the names involved in its development. Still, it randomly captures the atmosphere of the movies and can be quite fun online. Truly a missed opportunity.

The enemies in this game are just dumb as a damned rock.

It has combat in both its campaign and competitive modes that feels extremely appropriate, and there’s a generous amount of very “Aliens” content here. Just expect the plotting and atmosphere to feel slightly stale throughout.

It’s a shame that a title seven years in the making could result in something so lackluster. Aliens: Colonial Marines had the foundations of a solid game, involving writers (David Weddle and Bradley Thompson from Battlestar Galactica fame) and a talented artist (Syd Mead from Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron). It even had the right voice talent bringing back Lance Henriksen as a Bishop-model clone...But it appears that the elongated, ‘stop-start’ development ultimately resulted in an inconsistent and disappointing final result.

An unremarkable FPS plagued by dim AI and repetitive set-pieces. [Apr 2013, p.68]

Aliens: Colonial Marines is not the bad game that most reviewers have made it out to be. With the reviews it's been getting, you would think it was unplayable! However, the hoax that Pitchford sold with his video demo two years ago has clearly poisoned the well. Everyone seems to want to know: Where is that game? With Colonial Marines supposedly outsourced, all the talent went to Borderlands 2, I guess.

Aliens Colonial Marines is a half baked cake. The recipe and the pictures look delicious but the implementation reveals the only obvious thing: The game's age. Old look, old feeling and old design. Some fresh ideas, a fun multiplayer mode and decent fan service save the day.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a decent love letter to a great sci-fi movie, but it falls short of being something special in its own right. It’s an above-average licensed game, but a below-par shooter. Fans of the franchise will either love it for the subtleties and little details it gets right, or hate it for missing some of the most important parts.

With solid shooting mechanics, well-designed environments and a tense atmosphere, it’s a fine first-person shooter, but its repetitiveness, glitches, substandard graphics and insubstantial story make it a far cry from anything close to matching the prestige of James Cameron’s beloved film.

Once you best the 6-8 hour campaign - and suffer through an absolute butchering of some long-held Aliens narrative themes - it's time to try out the surprisingly solid multiplayer modes. While the head-to-head options will likely be an afterthought for many franchise faithful, the online throwdowns actually manage to capture the Aliens feel better than the campaign itself.

Colonial Marines can't trade on nostalgia alone... It needed to offer intense combat against an unstoppable force, deft storytelling that matched the cinematic flair of the films, and some new ideas that could have rejuvenated an overexposed franchise. It needed, in short, to be a better game.

This is really a review of two games: a derivative story campaign (that you can play solo or with up to three friends in co-op) and a riveting, far superior multiplayer mode that allows you to compete as marines or alien xenomorphs in online matches. Considering Colonial Marines’ relatively long gestation period — roughly six years — it seems more attention was paid to fine-tuning multiplayer than to the campaign.

A missed chance both for Sega/Gearbox and every Aliens or even FPS genre fan. Unsatisfying in every aspect, Aliens: Colonial Marines doesn't do justice to the name it carries.

In essence if Colonial Marines were chocolate it would be Cadbury's; it's chocolate, has all the ingredients of chocolate, but the only real attraction is the name, the quality leaving you somewhat hollow and unfulfilled.

This is a wasted chance. While Rebellion's Aliens vs. Predator remake at least occasionally managed to deliver horror atmosphere and suspense, Colonial Marines mutates to a rather dull run-and-gun-experience, while the visuals seem older than the movie this is based on.

If you’re a fan of sci-fi classics Aliens: Colonial Marines will be worth a nostalgic trip down memory lane because of the authenticity in the game. Even the multiplayer is worth a shot, but the generic and boring single player mode will not entertain you for long. On nearly every field this game falls short and adds little to the first-person shooter genre.

Due to the simplicity of the levels and lack of enemy diversity, the game experience was extremely short; it took 2 players about 5 hours to finish the campaign on hardened difficulty, and to be clearer, we can say that the only difference between difficulties lays in damage resistance and the lack of a HUD.

Even though I have a terribly high tolerance for bad monster movies, I still couldn't find an excuse for Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game has been in development for over five years, and nearly every single component has some major flaw. It's yet another black eye on a franchise that's already taken a heavy beating.

Sad, boring and at times buggy beyond belief. The Aliens seem weak, the tension absent and even though the set pieces are great, the whole game feels bland. The last half of the game improves a bit, but by then you have already lost all faith. Mediocre at best. In space no one can hear you cry.

It’s not all bad. Through the slow-boil of falling standards, sometimes we found ourselves not hating it as much we probably should have and, occasionally, there were glimpses of what Aliens: Colonial Marines could have been, should have been. It’s best at being an intense shooter, but sadly that intensity is all too rare.

As a player, you would expect a survival horror game but it's nothing more than a normal shooter. But there are better shooters available. ACM contains bugs and fails on the graphical aspects. Not worth a buy.

I haven’t been this disappointed in a game in a long, long time. Not only does the campaign welch on its opportunity to create interesting and additive content in the Aliens universe, but the multiplayer is languid, broken, and laughably frustrating. Colonial Marines plays it as safe as possible and still can’t manage to copy successfully proven ideas.