Over the past 10 years, the Alien xenomorph universe has taken several serious hits. Here we can recall mediocre films like "Alien vs. Predator" and weak attempts to recreate the confrontation between humans and Aliens in video games.
Many would say that the failure of Aliens: Colonial Marines was as unexpected as the Chelyabinsk meteor, and they would be right. As it turned out, the gameplay videos that Gearbox Software fed to players were based on a pretty decent beta version, much of which was simply thrown out later.
It’s already known that the renowned developers were just pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, assuring that they were “true fans of the series,” “paying increased attention to the game’s graphical quality,” and “not rushing the release because such a complex project requires careful polishing.” In fact, Aliens: Colonial Marines is nothing more than a pre-release version that nobody even thought about polishing, with a bunch of inexcusable flaws.
The scandal that erupted after fans trashed the game in their reviews revealed serious organizational problems at SEGA as a publisher. Over the eight years since its announcement, work on Aliens: Colonial Marines was handled by four different studios at once, and although all the blame for the failure lies with Gearbox Software, SEGA should have looked for more competent developers as soon as delays started cropping up. What actually happened was that Gearbox was focused on Borderlands 2, and only visited the dark horse TimeGate Studios a couple of times in the six months before Aliens: Colonial Marines was released.
Immediately after the game's release, there were numerous comparisons between the demo version published a few months earlier and the final version of the game. Unsurprisingly, the comparisons were not in favor of the latter. Why did Gearbox Software have to cut dynamic shadows, high-quality textures, a whole range of locations, and the authentic atmosphere of LV-426? Obviously, because no one wanted to delay the game's release "yet again," and the product had to be sent to print.
Very, very rarely does Aliens: Colonial Marines resemble what the developers were striving for. Still, don’t expect any horror elements — without modern graphics and sound technologies, that’s impossible, so the game feels more like another Call of Duty. You kill ten xenomorphs, listen to your teammates talk, kill another dozen Weyland-Yutani soldiers, and so on. The location design itself isn’t bad, but again, the lack of proper visuals negates the designers’ efforts.
And yet we know that in the demo version, everything was relatively decent. Yes, some elements needed to be finished, but overall, the game looked quite respectable. It could actually scare you, and the enemies didn’t look like clowns. And the background sound environment was really good! The demo made it clear that, aside from the protagonist, there were only hordes of hungry, hissing xenomorphs nearby. Rewatching the gameplay videos, it becomes clear that quality sound design was sacrificed for the sake of releasing the game.
The plot of Aliens: Colonial Marines is also very poorly stitched together and contains a lot of inconsistencies, even though SEGA claimed it was approved by FOX itself. Maybe that’s true, but it’s likely that entire chapters were removed before the game’s release, and apparently, they contained the main parts of the story.
Given all of the above, it’s hard to expect anything in the single-player mode that could be praised. The human enemies turned out more or less decent, but the xenomorphs look downright comical and cartoonish. They don’t inspire any fear at all, move straight towards the player, and die from a single shot. And the final battle with the Alien Queen in the spaceship hangar, where the player just has to pull a lever on a space catapult, is laughably bad! It’s hard to imagine a worse implementation—so boring and tedious that it’s difficult to describe in words. On top of that, you can finish the game without firing a single shot, and your allies teleport out of nowhere.
Gearbox Software’s co-op mode turned out just as bad and suffers from the same problems as the single-player campaign. If you’re interested in multiplayer, that’s probably the only mode worth trying, but even it is plagued by numerous balance issues.
Looking at the animation above, you just want to say: "Guys, you messed it up yourselves, now deal with it yourselves—I'm out of here..."
