Super Hyped Irreparable Trash, An Aliens: Colonial Marines Reveiw

Heh, I made the title spell S.H.I.T.

It's funny because the game is terrible. 

I have a confession to make, I love all things Alien, even Alien 4. I've played many of the Alien games in the past even those of the Vs Predator variety and have been immediately in like with them.

Be aware gentle reader, I have full game spoilers in this review and I do share the ending. Not now. Near the end of the review. You have been warned.

At first this was the case with A:CM. I really wanted to play this game and I had seen tons of photo references I liked; the throwback design of the text in the game that looks like the text first seen in the opening scenes of the early movies aboard the Nostromo and Solaco.

Immediately after the aforementioned text showed on a blank black screen the game opens into a in game movie that stops, stutters and shakes so bad I turned my system off, loaded the game to my hard drive, and started it again. No change.

"Well ASM," I said to myself, "maybe the playable stuff is better."  As soon as I started moving I saw screen tearing and sighed. A little further in I started to see that everything in the background looked like it wasn't fully rendered. Things like projections on the wall, generators on the floor look smeared and undefined, words on them are muddy blobs.

Then I saw. . . The aliens.

Good god, the aliens.

Honestly they are hard to talk about and not be sad. Yes, only one word of the three words in the title is Aliens, but they should have been the focus. Right away I'll tell you that the story is bullshit. It's a shame, but it's far and away shockingly bad. Badly acted, poorly written, and filled with characters that aren't built in anyway, and animated poorly to boot.

Lance Henriksen is voicing Bishop in it, I will give the game this one allowance and only this one, Lance Henriksen. I digress, the aliens in A:CM are laughable. The aliens continuously walk directly in front of your fire, and whilst walking out in the open will randomly just stand the fuck up on their back legs and do a sideways walking shuffle that is odd looking to say the least. These murderous beasts will kill npcs in one strike but when they face off against you are found lacking, one burst of fire will destroy them and their acid blood might as well be saliva. It effects you for mere seconds and makes it so that your always-replenishing-health doesn't replenish for those few seconds. In fact there is an achievement around blasting an alien close range with a shotgun specifically to get acid on you. Seriously these puppies are defanged.

Now basically your story is random set pieces that they throw the characters into but honestly this could be any licensed game with the bare bones story they provided. Level one is catching up with the story before you get to the Solaco and see the bottom half of Bishop with the white blood everywhere, just the mess left from the movie Aliens. You play a character named Winter, not that it matters. You are mostly teamed with a big guy named Oneal and run from place to place fighting aliens. There is a girl named Bella who in the first level tells you she had a face hugger on her when she woke up in a random room, the player knows what her eventual end will be but they have her throughout more the half the game. Again no development of the character, death means nothing but she dies.

Now you don't just fight aliens you fight enemies that are part of the Weyland-Yutani corporation and they don't like you fucking around with the aliens. There is a ton of fighting these guys too, and they have the smarts to hide behind cover when they are being shot at and actually are sometimes a challenge. Your overpowered weapons and room crossing shotgun blasts will make short work of any enemy so the last few levels just becomes quantity over quality. It is eventually revealed that somewhere in the base the WY folks are harboring a queen in their base and trying to monetize her. Of course she breaks loose and you have to fight her.

I am going to give a quick list of the 11 levels of the game as too what you do in each level.

1. Tutorial you see aliens and learn to shoot guns
2. Bullshit
3. Weyland-Yutani blow up the Sulaco
4. On planet, Hadley's Hope where much of Aliens movie takes place
5. Water level where you've been de-gunned and now have to sneak past new explodey aliens. Seriously. In a shoot-em-up game there is a for no reason stealth level. Honestly this level is quite nerve racking, and with an Alien game the whole thing should've been this level but with just a few guns and low ammo.
6. Bullshit
7. Bullshit
8. Bullshit
9. Poorly rendered bullshit
10. Duckshit, it's like bullshit, but looser
11. End boss fight in which you end the level with 0 kills

The end level boss fight is the worst offender of the game. In this boss fight you don't fight the boss. You are in a hangar where you have crashed a ship. The captain has been pinned in the pilots seat and everyone else has found a way to fuck off and leave you alone. You then find out that the queen is in there with you. You can shoot at her to get her attention but mostly she goes from empty box to empty box that litter the hangar looking to hurt you. During this time you are to activate switches that are on opposite sides of a track with a shoving wall aimed specifically at the hole your crashed ship left. Guess what you do. The queen literally stops searching for you and runs and stands in the center of the track as soon and you activate all 4 four switches. You have one final toggle that launches her towards the hole. At which point she saves herself from falling but the trapped, and now dying captain activates the ship and commits suicide/murders the queen to end the game, stealing your kill.

I beat this game without going out of the way to collect anything and ended with 30 of 50 achievements. I need to be very clear: I hated every last thing about this game. It is not worth the 60 dollars to buy. Use the purchase to get Borderlands 2 if you haven't already.

So that's it for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

If there is a review you would like to see, let me know I the comments below.

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Disclosure: This is a non-sponsored review. All product was purchased by me and the purpose of this review is based solely on my own interests. No product or monetary compensation was given to me by said company.