Have you ever tried
sleeping on a night train? It’s brilliant in theory and at first it’s really
exciting. But in practice you’re thrown from side to side, there’s the constant
noise of the track, and the other five people snoring in your carriage. You spend
the entire journey praying for it to end. That’s exactly what this campaign is
like. You’ll enjoy the first thirty minutes to an hour and then you’ll suddenly
think to yourself “what the hell have they done to this game and why won’t it
end?!”
THE CAMPAIGN
Aliens:
Colonial Marines is set seventeen weeks after the film Aliens and is on the
same planet. USS Sephora gets a
distress call from the planet and goes to have a look around. To everyone’s
surprise there just happens to be an infestation of Xenomorph on the planet.
Your character and those around you have no idea what is going on and are
constantly asking questions that anyone who has ever heard of the Alien films
would have been able to give the answer to. This right here is the start of a
long trend whereby the game tries to build some sort of suspense but it just
doesn’t work at all.
The game starts off
quite well though and they chuck you straight into the deep end. You find
yourself battling Xenomorph from the word go and it does seem quite fun. But
then something happens. For some unknown reason you find yourself shooting at
other humans that have pretty much come out of nowhere. Turns out they’re
Weyland-Yutani men and they’re mad. You actually fight these guys for so long
that you forget that this is a game about aliens until they remind you about
two hours later. Luckily for you though their A.I isn’t very well programmed so
you’ll find that they’ll just stand in the middle of rooms for you to kill
them. Saying that the alien’s A.I is the same but occasionally they’ll walk on
walls as well. Don’t expect too much support from your fellow NPC marine chums
either because they’re A.I is just as good.
Anyway the story
continues to try and build suspense as it goes and fails miserably. It turns
out that one of your fellow marines has an alien inside of her and you have to
go on a little jolly to try and save her. I call it a jolly because the aliens
really aren’t scary when you out number them and they run towards you in
straight lines. After that you have to find a way of leaving the planet. Turns
out whoever wrote this storyline had no imagination and just decided to steal a
load of stuff from the films, rewrite some of it as if it was fan fiction,
throw it all together, and call it a game.
But the writers and A.I
programmers aren’t completely to blame for how bad this game really is, because
whoever designed the graphics did such a bad job that I spend thirty minutes
thinking that my TV was broken! How can you make graphics that bad in 2013 and
at the end of a computer generation? At least make the doors and elevators look
descent if you’re going to force players to stand in front of them for twelve
minutes whilst the game loads up the next section.
The weapons appear to
be very cool though. Well for about an hour anyway. They’ve kept the weapons
from the film which is great and they do give you quite a few weapons to choose
from. As well as this, as you rank up you unlock upgrades for your weapons. Unfortunately
there doesn’t seem to be much difference in the weapon choices and they all
pretty much have the same specs as each other. What also seems brilliant at
first but will leave you wanting to listen to traffic go by just for some
variety, is the sound of the weapons. They sound just like they do in the film.
This is awesome and I’m sure there would have been outrage if they’d changed
it. But when you have five guns that all sound the same going off constantly
for six hours.... well let’s just say this could be adopted as a new torture
technique.
Most people will
struggle to finish this campaign and will probably only do so because they feel
that they need to get their money’s worth. But there is no chance that anyone
will replay this campaign. The only reason anyone will put themselves through a
second play through of this is because they’ve got a friend that hasn’t played
it yet and they want to see them suffer.
MULTIPLAYER
The multiplayer is
where it was expected that this game would redeem itself. After all, there are
a lot of games that have awful campaigns but really good multiplayer segments. Well
it can be said that the multiplayer aspect of this game is better than its
campaign aspect, but that doesn’t really tell anyone anything.
There are four different
modes for multiplayer. Team Deathmatch is one of them and by far the worst
aspect of multiplayer. It’s a standard run around and shoot aliens game. Unless
you’re the aliens then you’ve got to attack the marines. What makes it worse is
that you still have the same weapons from the campaign, so you may as well all
have the same gun. But if you’re an alien then you’re in luck because you get
to choose out of three different primary attacks. The developers really messed
up what they could do with both aliens and marines right here.
The next mode, which is
slightly better than Team Deathmatch, is Extermination. Your class choices are
the same as before and are the same throughout all the multiplayer modes. But the
small difference is that the marines in this mode have to set bombs to destroy
nests of alien eggs, whilst the aliens have to stop this from happening. The idea
is pretty good but it’s ruined mainly by the fact that there is some sort of
overlord voice telling you what is going on ever five seconds and repeating
itself three or four times. It’s extremely irritating.
Then there’s Survivor mode
and you have to... well survive. All this mode consists of is four marines
hiding in a corner whilst four aliens run towards them. It is really boring. The
only upside to this mode is that when playing as the aliens you have a bit more
access to different classes. But you have to find them around the map and they’re
still not a great improvement.
The final mode is
called Escape. This mode is actually quite fun. It’s like Survivor but this
time the marines have to make their way from one end of the map to the other. It’s
quite enjoyable but at the same time you’ll find yourself thinking something
along the lines of “Left 4 Dead does this so much better” and saying to your
friends stuff like “Someone remind me, Why are we playing this instead of Left
4 Dead?”.
At least I can say the
controls were good though. I’d be lying of course, but I can still say it. To
be fair they’re not terrible, but they’re not good either. Controlling the
marines is ok if not a little erratic at times, but controlling the aliens isn’t
good at all. Actually it’s when you first take control of an alien that you
realise how regimented their motions really are.
THE
VERDICT
Aliens: Colonial
Marines is one of the worst things to come out of this franchise, and that’s
saying a lot. The story seems to be a load of ideas that have been stolen from
the films. Then they’ve been thrown together, mixed around, and edited to make
even less sense. If the story wasn’t so boring I think people would actually be
angry. The graphics do an ok job, but then have some real bad parts that are
just unforgivable. Then there’s the A.I. It does the job but it should do a lot
better. If you like you ‘A’ to have some ‘I’ then expect to be disappointed. The
weapons and sound effects are fun to start with but they soon lose their novelty,
and there is no way anyone is going to replay the campaign. The multiplayer redeems
itself a little, but not by much. It has some game mode variety, but they’re
all quite boring and have been done a lot better by other games a few years
ago. It’s a shame that the developers have ruined this great opportunity that
they were given.
LHSRAting
for Aliens: Colonial Marines 4.3/10 (Xbox 360)
-Ayden
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