Aliens: Colonial Marines Review

[Halcyon.]

The Alien franchise, much like the Human Centipede from the homonymous movie, ended up eating out the already-digested concepts from the previous element in the column. Whether it’s the AvP movies form 2004 and 2007, respectively or the game with the same title from 2010, money was made from a second-rate sci-fi boosted through production value, or in the game’s case, from an average, heavily-consolized shooter.
Well, the newest game in the franchise, whose production was announced in December 2006, finally saw the light of day, like a late chestburster showing off its ugly mug from inside Duke Nukem Forever’s bloody ribcage. At the same time, it makes the mediocre, heavily consolized shooter from three years ago to seem like the most intense murder game ever invented since the invention of gunpowder.

The intro cinematic puts us right into the visual grammar of the second movie with the finesse of a derelict cargo ship, while a very generic character model is presented as Corporal Hicks, this intergalactic Kyle Reese. We deduce from the fairly poor recording slapped onto the game as a serving exposition that the described events come shortly after the events described in the James Cameron flick.
Much like J.R., Gandalf or Jesus Christ, Hicks pulls the resurrection card out of his ass, disguised here under the pretext that he gave up his place in the cryosleep capsule by another guy with the same shoe size.
Once we’re well into the campaign, we meet A:CM’s protagonist, Cpl. Christopher Winter (a reference to AvP2’s hero, I presume), a guy cursed with the terrible destiny of having to overcome a continuous series of gauntlet events for about five hours in such exotic environments such as monochrome interiors, flat exteriors and generic, repetitive laboratories (a reference to Call of Duty, I assume).

The enemies are made up not only of xenomorphs, but an entire army of mercenaries, made up of like three models photocopied over and over again, with an extremely silly AI, endowed with the best aiming possible in an attempt to compensate for its ridiculous behavior. The xenomorph models are somewhat more creative, sometimes at the cost of logic (for instance, there’s a blind specimen that guides itself by following the sounds and explodes when reaching its target, invented for an overused mechanic from other videogames and absolutely silly as a monster in a horror game).
The single-player has all the disadvantages of a Call of Duty campaign (the progress linearity is interrupted by quick-time events and animations in which the hero uses tools on the environments – in the present case, the Aliens-inspired welding serves as a continuous, boring chorus to the five hours of game time, there are allies that hold your hand most of that time) without the eye-candy or the blockbuster stunts that wake you up every now and again from the general numbness that is the tunnel-shaped interactivity of the military shooter.

The dialogues endlessly repeat a few emblematic marine quotes and otherwise just stray from anything remotely consistent, sometimes crippling the story so bad that it would have been better to just mutely pass the time. From the officer refusing to enforce his own orders because presumably you wouldn’t follow up on them anyway to the infested brother in arms who takes out a grenade and wipes out his entire squad before his own demise, nearly every decision and twist in A:CM seem to be a pointless caricature of moments in the films.
For instance, Gorman’s incompetence is explained in the movie franchise by the Weyland-Yutani intervention in the mission and the handpicking of an inexperienced officer to reduce the marines’ odds of success – his lack of experience, panic attack as soon as something unexpected happens, they’re all consistent with his lack of character. In Colonial Marines, twists are copied out of context, without the causality or circumstances that lead up to them.
At the same time, the many campaign moments in which you have to defend an objective from a continuous invasion of xenomorphs are totally undermined by the AI which, even by Call of Duty standards, is extremely weak. The aliens just make a B-line towards their aggroed target, and most of the time all you have to do not to be it is not fire the first shot and not be the closest to the massacre out of your allies.
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The arsenal at your disposal is more or less taken straight out of the movie, augmented with standard weaponry from any conventional shooter, with a seemingly newer mark for the Pulse Rifle, a big-ass machine gun, a sniper rifle, two types of shotguns and two types of handguns.
The “temporary” weapons, the ones we put down once we’re out of ammo, are the Smartgun, the RPG or flamethrower, and normally we’ve got two active weapon slots, and the rest can be accessed through a typical circular menu.
Some weapon variations, branded as “Legendary”, can be found throughout the game world. Be it Hicks’ shotgun, Vasquez or Gorman’s handguns, they’re somewhat more efficient than their vanilla counterparts and offer a bit of soul food for the franchise fans, next to the Dog Tags and collectible audio recordings.
The iconic motion tracker has been inserted in a controversial manner: its display on the screen holsters any weapon you have active and is extremely slow and sluggish. You’d think the handicap of such a mechanic would be obvious, particularly after Doom III’s flashlight, but the producers don’t seem to have learned a lot from that fiasco.

But not matter how varied the weapons are, it’s hard to get over the slim foundation A:CM stumbles on. There’s an impressively bad quantity of precisely two boss fights, both of them quite disappointing both in their presentation and mechanics. A short, tight fight in a power loader against a queen and a match of dodge and spray against a Tank-like xenomorph (resembling any enemy type that charges into walls from any videogame from the last twenty years) are the only brief moments that should, theoretically, raise the pressure bar a notch or two, but their execution utterly blows.
A maximum of four players can restart the entire campaign or specific missions (under the condition that the host had progressed enough to unlock said missions) to get achievements, collect secret objects or just finish the game on superior difficulty levels (Hardened and Ultimate Badass). The game has a voice chat system, but is fairly problematic and unstable, unlike many shooters from the last five years, also has a written chat system, one that every PC game in this day and age should sport.

The game’s strong point (and for some buyers, its redeeming quality) is the Versus mode, the competitive multiplayer module that was included in the package. Four game modes (Team Deathmatch, Escape, Survivor and Extermination) on multiple maps, in formats varying from 4 vs. 4 to 6 vs. 6, depending on the game mode.
The Escape and Survivor modes are extremely similar to what Left 4 Dead has in store, which is a team of Marines fending off against a Xenomorph team (each player can pick one class out of three: Soldier – a melee class that can take a few hits before dying, Spitter – a ranged class spitting acid in the face of their enemies and Lurker – a very fragile leaper class, very similar to the Hunter from L4D (plus a few bonus skins you can select off the map, varying from the Xeno Tank to the Boomer equivalent from the Valve hit).
The hero customization, be it a Marine or Xenomorph, has both to do with looks as well as mechanics. There’s an entire wardrobe of faces, accessories, tattoos and helmets that get unlocked once you level up (much like the CoD system) as well as various unlockable Challenges in the game. The challenge system has fairly new progression format (pretty frustrating, too) – thus, we’ve got three columns with one type of challenge through which we have to progress in a linear manner and we can only complete the active challenge in each column. Some of them are terribly unpredictable and hard to obtain, especially in the lousy technical state that the game is currently wallowing in.

In terms of mechanics, the Marines faction has a passive ability called a Trait and can prolong your sprinting sessions or health pools, the weapons can be customized in terms of attachments, alternate fire, skin or stat augmentation and the auxiliary gear can be swapped to frag grenades, incendiary grenades or claymore mines.
The xenomorphs, on the other hand, can customize their main attack, the secondary attack and their fatalities, an instakill animation with an animation that takes considerably more than a simple attack. The versatility permitted by such customizations widens the tactic pool players can pick something out of and partially raise A:CM’s level over the mediocrity of most of its elements. Which doesn’t mean we don’t have any sort of issues here.
Memorable bugs include, but are not restricted to: The Lurker getting stuck on top of its victim in certain Pounce scenarios, inexplicably, claymore damaging you through walls or delayed damage even in situations in which the latency is decent, again, inexplicably. The maps that are currently available aren’t wildly original, but they work and in some instances brilliantly render the atmosphere of sheer tension and despair from the movies.
Although the game has annoying problems in its functionality, the few moments that work and there’s no lag and we’re fortunately not being dead-stopped by some bizarre bug, it’s a very interesting multiplayer experience.

In fact, there’s a general inconsistency that defines Colonial Marines. Extremely silly aspects tie-in with features that, had they been better implemented, would have meant a big step forward compared to the already generic CoD or the overused Left 4 Dead.
In its actual state, however, we’ve got an archaic game well over a title’s developmental sweet spot (six years means about twice the optimal incubation period for an AAA title) which brings old tech, old looks and old concepts, badly stitched together and, what’s worse, promoted as being more than it actually is.
The illumination, character models and the particle effects are way below the gameplay demo that enchanted the world and I don’t recommend A:CM’s acquisition unless you can actually tolerate an ocean of issues and annoyances for that brief segment in the game that, when it works, shines for a while. And then gets swallowed whole by the failures catching up.