Game Review - Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013)

Aliens Colonial Marines takes place after Alien 3 and sees a distress signal released by Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) from the USS Sulaco near LV-426 and a team of Colonial Marines led by a man named Winter are sent to investigate but they will find much more than they originally expected.

When I first saw the initial game play videos for this game last year I thought to myself "This looks really good and really authentic" to the atmosphere of James Cameron's 1986 sequel to Alien, I also got very excited to play the game and now the time had come in which I could now play it for myself.

Sadly though, the game does not live up to the high hopes I had for it, those hopes being that this might be a fun sci-fi shooter with some nice fan service not unlike High Moon Studios' two Cybertron titles, don't get me wrong the game is far from terrible, the sound design is clever, the shooting mechanics are solid, the weapon customization is good and its nice to see Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles from the film.

But the game as a whole feels very tedious to play and will get boring rather quickly with the endless times you die in a level, the lack of sufficient health and ammo to help you through fire fights and the overall length of level's that just made me think "Get on with It" now normally this shouldn't be a bad thing given that most single player campaign's average out at a length of 6 hours but here it feels like a drain on the player's playing time and it just left me with a feeling of "I've done enough" without even finishing the campaign which is something I always like to do so that I have a proper feeling for whether I want to keep the game for any future play throughs.

And on top of those problems, the actual fire fights in the game aren't that exciting, the stealth missions where your navigating Alien hives are exciting and do induce a sense of tension but the fire fights with the actual Aliens just made me think of the PS3 shooter series Resistance (Resistance 2 is very much Aliens as a game) and the shooter with the humans sent to kill you just made me think of Call of Duty.

Look, to sum up, Aliens Colonial Marines is far from terrible but it's also not a shooter that stands out among its peers, Aliens fans will certainly have a fun time with the game but for me, it just made me want to play the Resistance trilogy and the Cybertron shooters again as those were examples of not only good sci-fi shooters but in the case of Transformers how to do excellent fan service that makes them want to come back for more rather than trade it in when it's all over, if your keen to play it give it a rent first to see what it's like, 2.5 out of 5.