Aliens: Colonial Marines review: Xenophobia

If Aliens: Colonial Marines were a Hadley’s Hope-style space colony, I’d want to visit for one very specific reason. I’d arrive early, standing at the edge of a cliff on its lifeless surface, holding up red flares as I see the legendary USS Sulaco break the atmosphere, full of eager fanboys ready to play a game with tons of promise and years of troubled development behind it. Then, I would toggle my radio transmitter to a wide-space broadcast and shout to the heavens, “Do not land! Everything here is dead! Game over, man!”

Maybe it would fall on deaf ears in a universe that favors pre-orders, but if I could warn off even a few Aliens diehards, my sacrificial slog through this game’s ugly, poorly acted monotony would not be in vain.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is bad. Not “so bad it’s good,” not “uneven, but with bright spots,” not “good except for awful glitches.” If it had launched in its current state alongside Doom 3 in 2004, A:CM would’ve been laughed out of the room for not even surpassing id’s graphics engine, enemy AI, acting, or missions.

The comparison is apt: Gearbox Software has dared to deliver a faithful chunk of Aliens canon, but hundreds of other games (like, you know, Doom) have already mined James Cameron’s general concept of hulking aliens and badass space marines without being tied down by a film license.

But blaming the handicap of the Aliens brand for the game’s limited selection of enemies and weapons, not to mention an incredibly boring series of environments, gives the developers far, far too much credit. Welcome to hell.

Brain-dead battles

A:CM‘s campaign kicks off with the distress signal sent by the crew of the USS Sulaco near the end of the Aliens film. Your unit arrives 17 weeks afterward to find a ship filled with dead bodies, green goo, and lurking xenomorphs. Your first mission is to save a trapped comrade, who doesn’t take long to blow himself up before the beast in his belly awakens. From there, your crew of marines must battle both xenomorphs and corporate Weiland Yutani thugs—the latter, to nobody’s surprise, are trying to stage a massive cover-up of the whole debacle (among other things).

If only the atmosphere of this screenshot made it into the game somehow.

The word “battle” in the last sentence deserves a few asterisks. Your human adversaries, even on the highest difficulties, bounce between being blissfully ignorant dolts when they’re a few steps away to ridiculously accurate snipers when they’re across a giant field. The lack of powerful weapons or compelling squad tactics among the enemy humans makes them feel like an insubstantial presence in the game. Your weapons are also severely limited: shotguns, machine guns and pistols, along with an occasional smartgun or flamethrower. Alternate fire with grenades and lightning bolts spice these up a bit, but barely.

Comparatively, you’d expect the alien xenos to bring the thunder. Not so much. A:CM peppers its corridor-heavy levels with sewer grates, ceiling holes, and other perfect spots for xenos to pop out and scare your marine. A motion tracker that pops up quickly with the tap of a button is supposed to provide warning of these ambushes, but it’s rarely useful, mainly because it doesn’t kick into gear until the game engine spawns foes in your immediate vicinity. This failing shines brightest when itty-bitty, hard-to-see “facehuggers” spawn right above you, with next to no warning from the tracker. In any case, these hiding spots never seem to preface a well-choreographed fight; your foes almost always appear straight ahead in uninteresting formations.

Xenos enjoy a lofty reputation in modern sci-fi for their mix of crafty and quick maneuvers, but those features are rarely on display in A:CM, especially when they haphazardly target your AI companions—invincible allies who carry unlimited ammo. Xenos will often trot right past you to suck down infinite AI bullets, which kills a lot of the tension.

Alien and human foes alike spawn out of thin air quite a bit—or glitch through injury and running motions into unexpected locations. This happens a lot in the game’s open-air zones, typically giant fields where xenomorphs appear in the distance to crawl along a building or hop across debris. If you camp out to watch the xenos as they approach, you’ll likely catch one of the game’s biggest failings, as each and every one follows the exact same path. Spawn from hole. Crawl to point A. Hop to point B. Crawl to point C. Nearly every xeno encounter follows a scripted path, and it won’t take even a novice marine very long to crack the code.

Jumping into an online co-op match doesn’t mitigate these issues; enemy counts, spawn locations, and behaviors remain the same. In fact, so little of the game is tuned for cooperative tactics, even at the hardest difficulties, that you have to wonder whether the option was just shoehorned into an already-constructed solo game.

This is Aliens?

Not that good graphics could make up for these gameplay failings, but just for good measure, this game gives a new meaning to the word ugly. Its open expanses mostly consist of low-poly rock crag formations, all lined with invisible walls. The low-res textures are pretty astounding; every computer screen in A:CM glistens with low-res lines of “text” that you might expect from an N64 game. Effects in the distance are rendered as flat banners; simply tilt your view and a plume of smoke will look like it had been ripped from Duke Nukem 3D. Human faces are frozen, except for mouths and eyebrows.

A:CM‘s pre-rendered cut scenes look ripped from a prior build of the game, full of blurry textures, badly animated faces, and lower polygon counts. By itself, the disconnect is a little jarring; combined with the rest of the game, it’s further proof of the “screw it, just sell the game” attitude Gearbox has delivered. Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t just a fluke, then.

Misery loves company, I guess…

On occasion, the dialogue, matched to those lifeless faces, proves unintentionally hilarious—particularly one argument over a “leave the marine behind!” order that would be destined to win a Razzie if it appeared in a film. Even that measure of unintentional comedy is rare; most one-liners are nonsensical barks that rarely sound tough or fun. Certainly, the script never aspires to its inspiration’s emotionally charged bravado (other than repeating the phrase “leave no marine behind” over a dozen times). Though the voice work generally ranges from serviceable to strained, Michael Biehn’s phoned-in performance could prove to be the worst game voiceover of the past decade—so much for fan service.

A multiplayer hope?

To be fair, the competitive multiplayer modes received at least a little more care; asymmetrical combat between marines and xenos has its enjoyable moments, and some of the team deathmatch levels give xenos (which come in three classes: spit, sneak, or overwhelm) plenty of crawl/hide spots to surprise and disrupt an otherwise well-equipped marine squad.

Even this small bit of fun is sapped, though, thanks to an experience ranking system that’s split into human and xeno levels. Your human XP goes up with any solo, co-op, or versus play, but xenos only benefit from online battling. This means it only takes a seven-hour run through the torturous campaign to max out a super-powered, heat-sensing battle rifle for your multiplayer marine that can take out any newbie xeno.