Aliens: Colonial Marines Review — Impossible Not To Hate [REVIEW]

I'm going to be honest with you right off the bat: Aliens: Colonial Marines is hard to like. And it's not because it's a bad game or sucks the big one. But if you're a fan of the movies, you will hate this game. It's impossible not to.

Aliens: Colonial Marines tries to take the classic James Cameron trilogy and turn into a first-person shooter. Which is good in theory, but in practice obviously has its flaws.

Gearbox Software and 20th Century Fox are treating Colonial Marines as an official sequel to the 1986 Aliens movie. Its campaign plot picks up some 17 weeks after the disastrous events that occurred at LV-426, with a new squad of marines sent in to explore the abandoned Sulaco spaceship and the remains of Hadley’s Hope.

The environments are lush and really recreate the look and feel of the movies. The Aliens and Marines look pretty awesome as well. Overall, graphically, its quite inspiring what painstaking detail was put into this game visually. The campaign mode's story is also arguably one of the best shooter plots in a long, long time. However, that's where the warm, fuzzy trip down memory lane ends.

In the movies, the Xenomorphs were highly sophisticated killers -- hiding, prowling and killing with precision. Here, they attack like a bunch of smacked-out hobos: lunging and missing the target, slowly meandering their way through the environment and even, at times, waiting for you to reload your weapon so you can blast them to the great beyond.

In the several hours I've spent with the game so far, I never felt any real danger. I never felt outwitted or outmatched. I just marched through like a good soldier, killing the Aliens one by one...which is the real travesty here. That's really what causes this game to lose major points.

This game is a decent run-and-gun, first-person shooter. You walk through with cool weapons and blast the hell out of everything that moves. But this isn't suppose to be just ANY FPS; it's supposed to be an Aliens FPS. There is suppose to be suspense. There is supposed to be eminent danger around every turn. At some point, what is suppose to be tense and challenging somehow became an almost laughable arcade style shoot 'em up.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Again, with all that being said, (and I can't say this enough) Aliens: Colonial Marines is not a bad game.

If you've never seen any of the Aliens movies or anything and you view this game as a stand-alone title, you'll love it. There is plenty of action and good, clean extraterrestrial killing fun.

However, if you're a fan of the movie franchise (like me), the only thing dying is your soul. The game looks like Aliens. It sounds like Aliens. Unfortunately, it just doesn't feel like Aliens. You can tell a lot of effort and love was put into this game. Sadly, it just wasn't enough.