Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013)

Time for another tie-in review.  Words can barely describe how shit this travesty is.  But I’m going to try nonetheless. It’s supposedly a sequel to Aliens in development since 2006 and even licensed as canon by Fox.  Yet it is neither.  It’s a sequel to Alien3 and has been in development since at least 2001.  Everything, and I mean everything about this gangrenous mess is fucking terrible.  12 years and this is what they come up with?  It is the perfect storm of shit.  The graphics.  The gameplay.  The sound.  And worst of all, the story.  And I say that as one of the few people who likes all the Alien movies, including Prometheus, Alien3 and Alien Resurrection.  I usually don’t swear at games outside Battlefield online.  But I swore at this.  Repeatedly and with escalating rage.  It doesn’t look like an Aliens game, it doesn’t feel like one.  It retcons established lore here, there and everywhere.  It is truly a hateful piece of shit.

Firstly, a lamentation of the technical side.  AKA the thing that Gearbox and the confirmed two other development companies left for us in the toilet.  This game looks like ass.  It looks like a PS2 game and that’s funny because the game has been in development possibly even before the PS2 was released. Often, the textures don’t even load.  The animations are also hilarious, your fellow marines walk like baboons and the facial animations are out of sync.  Then there’s the gameplay.  The controls feel like the player is underwater.  The input lag is unbearable and the bullets simply do not connect with enemies.  When you’re playing through this pigshit, you also have to endure 1990’s style loading at each door.  Like it used to be in Resident Evil, some bullshit animation or sound to try and disguise it.  Even my dumbass AI partner eventually got impatient with waiting for a door to open – the most intelligent thing he did all night.  It is what should technically be called a write-off.  It should never has passed playtesting in this state.

I was willing to forgive the shit graphics.  I was willing to endure the utter garbage gameplay.  I was holding out that it would be a nice nostalgic kick with an interesting take on canon, if nothing else.  But unfortunately, the story is perhaps the worst thing of all.  Somehow, Hadleys Hope survived a 40 megaton blast (The near equivalent of the Tsar Bomb, the largest bomb ever detonated on Earth).  You’re able to walk around it and breath normally, with most things intact. Nevermind the fact there is no oxygen and probable lethal doses of radiation?  Then there’s Hicks.  He’s in the game.  Y’see, the body cremated in Alien3 was one that Hicks switched.  Aha!  Then there’s Bishop.  He’s in the game.  Twice.  Y’see, the Bishops come off an assembly line.  And are all called Bishop.  And are all rendered in hideous 2002 graphics.  Then there’s the voice acting.  For example Biehn, who is clearly reciting lines written on a scrap of paper over the telephone to makers of this game.  Yes, it’s that shit.  And all these guys are on LV4-26.  Because Weyland-Yutani is down there doing some untoward shit.  It contradicts just about every Alien movie except the fourth in every insulting way imaginable.

The only reason to play this game is to see if each successive level can actually outdo the previous in terms of  shittness.  And it can.  This will go down as one of the worst games ever released.  It makes the AVP-R look like Aliens.  

2/10