Aliens: Colonial Marines (Xbox 360) review"I'll say this about Colonial Marines: had it been released a decade ago, it would have looked passable. The blocky modeling, muddy textures and embarrassing particle effects are all GameCube-quality, and the characters' complete lack of facial expressions would be acceptable in a world in which Half-Life 2 didn't come out over eight years ago." |
Your first encounter with a xenomorph in Aliens: Colonial Marines will be a memorable one, though not, I gauge, for the reasons Gearbox intended. The game follows a team of (yep) colonial marines as they investigate a distress signal sent by the USS Sulaco, which is in orbit over the still-very-much-intact settlement on LV-426. If that confuses you, congratulations: you've given this entry in the Aliens series more forethought than the developers did. But no matter. You board the seemingly abandoned ship and find it awash with xenomorph ooze, with several of your fellow marines already cocooned and missing vital pieces of their ribcages. And then an alien attacks you. It does so by standing upright, holding its arms out at its sides, and tiptoeing towards you at full speed. The xenomorphs in Colonial Marines move like ballerinas. It is the funniest and least intimidating animation ever to grace what's supposed to be a frightening creature, and it's the first laughable detail in a game that's absolutely full of them.
Colonial Marines is a disaster, and its disastrousness is compounded by it being a long-awaited, high-profile and supposedly canonical sequel to a classic film, handled by a major developer and released by a major publisher. After ages in production, we're left with a hideous, dated and uninspired first-person shooter that does its beloved franchise a tragic disservice. Who'd have expected a blunder like that from the team that brought us Duke Nu– oh.
Freelance review by Mike Suskie (February 13, 2013)
Mike Suskie is a freelance writer who has contributed to GamesRadar and has a blog. He can usually be found on Twitter at @MikeSuskie. |
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