Aliens Colonial Marines Review - Is it that bad?

By Sam Coles:

If you’re familiar with the internet in the gaming community then you’ll often hear the term “worst game ever” which is used a lot where it has almost become redundant. Aliens Colonial Marines is one of those games that often gets that title and honestly it’s not the worst game ever, however it is not a good game it is far from being a good game it is a bad game, but it is not a crime against humanity as some people would like you to think.

Aliens Colonial Marines is a direct sequel to Aliens where soldiers are sent in after a distress signal is sent to them from Hicks as they seem to contradict the film by saying that the crew survived. You go in and the space station is overran by the Xenomorphs, however the Weyland Yutani cooperation has sent in mercenaries to clear up the situation and the marines must battle human forces as well as the Alien threat. The story is very bland considering that it is a direct sequel to the fantastic movie that is Aliens where plays like someone’s fan fiction.

The gameplay is a first person shooter where you’re one of the marines (obviously) where you move through a linear set of levels shooting Xenomorphs sometimes, but most of the game you’re fighting humans with guns. I wouldn’t mind fighting human forces as they do have an interesting role in the story as they are trying to cover up the disaster but they are the main forces you’ll be fighting and considering it’s called Aliens you don’t fight them as often you’d like to.  You can either play this alone or with 3 friends but honestly it doesn’t make the experience better it makes it worse as the game is mostly set in tight corridors and it’s hard enough to walk down them with your brain dead A.I team mates.

The major problem with the game is that it feels really floaty and stiff and the guns lack impact. The sound design becomes ear grating from the weapons and I thought I would never get bored of the sound of the Pulse Rifle but I did as it sounds highly compressed with sound of burst fire even when you’re holding the trigger down. Grenades have no splash damage as the aliens or the humans have to be right next to them it’s as if you’ve thrown a party popper at them not an high impact explosive.

There are a lot of glitches such as your teammates getting stuck in doors and the Aliens clipping through walls which really breaks the immersion coupled with visual ques missing when you’re taking damage which can lead to a lot of frustrating deaths.

Visually the game looks horrible with muddy textures and horrendous screen tearing on the 360 anyway I’m sure you can tweak it on the PC. Character models look really abysmal which confuses me as this game was released in 2013 with games like The Last of Us, GTA V, Splinter Cell Blacklist and Bioshock Infinite had great character models and this really stands out of how bad it looks. The framerate is all over the place as it runs at an uncapped framerate as it shoots to run at 60 frames per second but it generally sits between 20-40 fps which is quite jarring when it fluctuates.

Aliens Colonial Marines is a bad game but does it deserve the title of worst game ever? No it doesn’t there are far worse games than this but this game is still a bad game and I’m not recommending this game at all. Thank god Alien Isolation saved the Alien game franchise in 2014.