Aliens: Colonial Marines Review - Game Over, Man
- Thread starter MikeWehner
- Start date
normally I wouldn't judge a game on its multiplayer (in conjunction with the single player, see devs of Spec Ops The Line who lamented about such), but as a fan of Gearbox who apparently really only touched the multiplayer in this game...guess that's all I have to judge on
still planning on grabbing the game from Redbox, but I'm not the biggest Aliens fan anyway :c
still planning on grabbing the game from Redbox, but I'm not the biggest Aliens fan anyway :c
You didn't seem to like Aliens: Colonial Marines, and had a lot to complain about. Why did you give it a positive 3/5 stars then? That's still a decent score, by no means great, but still decent.
Some other people are saying Jim started a conspiracy theory that the devs made a good level just for the press that wasn't even in the actual game.
I wanna see Angry Joe's reaction after he made a video of 10 reasons the game will rock.
I wanna see Angry Joe's reaction after he made a video of 10 reasons the game will rock.
Honestly, I saw this game at E3 2011 and it looked amazing. It was a live demo, hands-off but live, and it was fantastic. The final product looks like a turd by comparison to what I remember seeing.Crazy Zaul said:
I'm enjoying it thus far! Granted I'm only at the 3rd mission thus far, perhaps the bugs (err, glitches) start coming out a little later on. As for the story, I'm following it so far. Perhaps I'm just ignorant enough of the entire series' lore, but I haven't encountered any major plotholes yet. But I will say....spookydom said:
Seeing stuff like this is a bit distressing... And furthermore....Blunderboy said:On the plus side...
Yyyyeeeeaaahhh...I really gotta wonder what the point of always taking point when opening a door is when every time you do and start shooting at what's on the other side, your AI rushes right through the door and into your fire.Susan Arendt said:
STILL! I would say I'm enjoying it thus far...sadly I won't have any friends to play with until Thursday, unless one of the random jackasses on my friends list from Left 4 Dead picks it up or something.
And lastly...
And I'm still unhappy there is no Predator campaign.Neeckin said:
Would it be possible for you to put what the plot holes/retcons are in a spoiler tag seeing as the main reason I'm interested in the game is for the story!MikeWehner said:
Finished the campaign in a whopping 4 hours on soldier. Watched all the cinematics, found most of the hidden stuff.
Bland, generic and outdated mechanics. Having the "right loadout" is bullshit since you have all the weapons available to you at all times (once you unlock them), you just have to go to a 2-tier menu to "equip" them in your weapon slots. Except you can do this at any time in the game, so it's just a minor inconvenience.
Except for the smart gun, weapons are boring, bland and unsatisfying. I wound up using the Pulse Rifle about 90% of the time.
On Solder difficulty ammo and armour are so common that I never ran out (plus you have your whole arsenal at hand IF you'd ever run out of ammo for a single weapon) and the big, stompy Loader sections that were hyped are just bullshit. You spend 15 seconds opening a door, and about a minute fighting some big dude (and that just involves left clicking until it goes down). That's it!
Enemy AI is very bad, you'll often see xenos jumping around in place (though the first time it happened was worth a laugh - retard alien jumping up and down going "omg guys, I found them, I found them!") or human soldiers using stuff like a tiny railing as full body cover.
Also, for a game designed with co-op in mind, actually playing it with another person destroys what little atmosphere there is. The first encounter with a xeno was tense and fun at the same time alone, but throw in another player and it's just a sad joke. The whole motion tracker mechanic is just completely unnecessary. Quite honestly, co-op feels like a cheap, least minute addition to the game.
Story made me facepalm over and over and over, it's so incredibly bad.
Very disappointing, totally not worth a full price purchase.
Bland, generic and outdated mechanics. Having the "right loadout" is bullshit since you have all the weapons available to you at all times (once you unlock them), you just have to go to a 2-tier menu to "equip" them in your weapon slots. Except you can do this at any time in the game, so it's just a minor inconvenience.
Except for the smart gun, weapons are boring, bland and unsatisfying. I wound up using the Pulse Rifle about 90% of the time.
On Solder difficulty ammo and armour are so common that I never ran out (plus you have your whole arsenal at hand IF you'd ever run out of ammo for a single weapon) and the big, stompy Loader sections that were hyped are just bullshit. You spend 15 seconds opening a door, and about a minute fighting some big dude (and that just involves left clicking until it goes down). That's it!
Enemy AI is very bad, you'll often see xenos jumping around in place (though the first time it happened was worth a laugh - retard alien jumping up and down going "omg guys, I found them, I found them!") or human soldiers using stuff like a tiny railing as full body cover.
Also, for a game designed with co-op in mind, actually playing it with another person destroys what little atmosphere there is. The first encounter with a xeno was tense and fun at the same time alone, but throw in another player and it's just a sad joke. The whole motion tracker mechanic is just completely unnecessary. Quite honestly, co-op feels like a cheap, least minute addition to the game.
Story made me facepalm over and over and over, it's so incredibly bad.
Very disappointing, totally not worth a full price purchase.
That's assuming he can be arsed to play it at all. He didn't enjoy the latest Aliens Vs. Predators because the Marine campaign was the longest and most boring. He just might file this one under more "spunkgargleweewee".JPArbiter said:
Well, at least it couldn't be any worse than AvP 2010, right?... right?...
[small]I liked that game.[/small]
[small]I liked that game.[/small]
You'd be surprised...SupahGamuh said:
I thought AvP 2010 was ok. I finished it, which is more than I can say for a lot of games these days. It was a decent game, I had some fun with it, and I moved on.
Colonial Marine on the other hand... the first 15 minutes of the game are awesome. The other 3 hours and a bit are absolute shite. The only enjoyment I got from the game was abusing it with my co-op buddy.
I know rating structures are totally arbitrary, and subjective, but I have to ask,
Why in the name of all that is logical do you give 3 out of 5 to a game that you spent 2 pages tearing apart?
I haven't read a SINGLE review of this game that puts it above 50 out of 100. Every review says this game is shit. I can't understand your justification of 3-5. This game is shit. It's ok, you can admit it. Gearbox isn't going to cut off relations with the Escapist, and other companies aren't going to pull their product line. Hell, even IGN claimed this game was the biggest pile of dog crap in the last 5 years, and IGN is KNOWN for choking down the long hot salami of whatever production studio gives it a free AAA game.
Be honest with your rating. This game is shit, you know it, we know it, hell, I bet even Gearbox knew it. This game is BARELY 2-5, and more likely 1-5. The ORIGINAL AvP is better than this. (Anyone who remembers being in rooms with ZERO light and only having 3 or 4 flares, with aliens all around you, HIGH FIVE).
Why in the name of all that is logical do you give 3 out of 5 to a game that you spent 2 pages tearing apart?
I haven't read a SINGLE review of this game that puts it above 50 out of 100. Every review says this game is shit. I can't understand your justification of 3-5. This game is shit. It's ok, you can admit it. Gearbox isn't going to cut off relations with the Escapist, and other companies aren't going to pull their product line. Hell, even IGN claimed this game was the biggest pile of dog crap in the last 5 years, and IGN is KNOWN for choking down the long hot salami of whatever production studio gives it a free AAA game.
Be honest with your rating. This game is shit, you know it, we know it, hell, I bet even Gearbox knew it. This game is BARELY 2-5, and more likely 1-5. The ORIGINAL AvP is better than this. (Anyone who remembers being in rooms with ZERO light and only having 3 or 4 flares, with aliens all around you, HIGH FIVE).
Honestly, I never really saw what set this game apart from the last AvP game. Now, don't get me wrong, I rather liked AvP (or at least the multi-player - lots of fun), but considering that most people apparently did not, I never quite understood the interest this game seemed to have garnered, as it more or less looks the same, minus Predators.
While not a great game, I've enjoyed playing the coop with my girlfriend all day today. Fun enough, and as an Aliens fanboy there is plenty to make me grin and bear it.
It definitely isn't perfect, but at least give it a Redbox rental before you decide to shit all over it. I think in the coming weeks when more people actually try it and take the reviews with a grain of salt, the community may be a little more divided over the game. It's not as bad as most reviews make it seem (not to me, at least), and a decent way to waste an afternoon and evening if you're a total Aliens geek. If you've seen the film a multitude of times and get all teary-eyed nostalgic, searching out the easter eggs alone is worth the price of a rental, or even the price of the game once it hits bargain bins. Definitely not a $60 game, but at least worth a look.
It definitely isn't perfect, but at least give it a Redbox rental before you decide to shit all over it. I think in the coming weeks when more people actually try it and take the reviews with a grain of salt, the community may be a little more divided over the game. It's not as bad as most reviews make it seem (not to me, at least), and a decent way to waste an afternoon and evening if you're a total Aliens geek. If you've seen the film a multitude of times and get all teary-eyed nostalgic, searching out the easter eggs alone is worth the price of a rental, or even the price of the game once it hits bargain bins. Definitely not a $60 game, but at least worth a look.
A single instance of rescuing the flaming wreckage of another studio and releasing it does not establish a pattern.amiran123 said:
That said, Colonial Marines has a long series of problems. The core issue is simply that the game doesn't seem to have any idea what kind of game it wants to be. It pretends to frenetic action, likely a grab of that Call of Duty money and while that is certainly a viable route to take the game simply does not have that absolute perfection of narrow mechanical set to make it work. Firing a weapon isn't terribly satisfying; indeed, firing a pulse rifle at an Alien barely seems to register until it keels over dead. And while one might attribute that to their alien physiology, that human enemies will happily absorb a burst of a half dozen rounds designed to penetrate their fancy body armor before having any reaction. If one wants to build the game around the left-trigger, right-trigger concept, there is much to be said about making that pull of the right trigger do something satisfying.
At other moments the game seems to really want to play the horror angle. Rather than simply gun down hoards of aliens, the game simply places a handful in the area that are seemingly faster, more aggressive, more durable, and more lethal than their fodder cousins. In these moments, the game actually shines even on a cooperative front.
But, seemingly in an effort to enforce a negative opinion, the game then commits egregious sins. It forces stealth sequences with, in many cases, instant fail mechanics. While such a sequence might be useful for building tension, the game manages to make it simply tedious as it simply becomes a game of red light, green light.
And, even from a narrative front there are problems. In one example, I encountered an alien and the game cut to black. In spite of being in the company of a half dozen other marines, in the next sequence I found I had been captured and cocooned. While it may be possible that I suffered a minor stroke, there was no explanation how I jumped from moment to moment. Such narrative leaps happen more than once and the only explanation I can conjure is that a segment was unceremoniously cut. When the game has little else to lean on, introducing these plot holes all but ensures that few will manage to find any enjoyment.
Still, if there were a single problem to point to, it is the Human opponents. While it is all terribly fun to assume WY is a menace to the world (and fairly well justified all told from what we know from the core movies), there is absolutely zero possible explanation for the PMC's actions. I'll spoiler tag the next section as it does involve plot discussion:
That WY wants to cover up their actions is perfectly understandable. But considering that the cover-up is being conducted by people, presumably with a working brain between their ears, one must question just how they hope the whole event will play out. They engage in pitched firefights with the Marines while Xeno's overrun everything. They open fire using the Sulaco's weapons while positioned perhaps 60 yards away which eventually results in the apparent destruction of both vessels. At every turn the human troops express the survival instincts of bacon. The marines have trouble putting the good of humanity before their own lives. The WY troops appear to have no such dilemma placing the interests of a company that is every inch a comic book level villain (complete with mustache twirling) before their own lives
I wanted to like the game. I wanted to like it enough that I managed to actually have some amount of fun playing it. There is some enjoyment to be wrung from this husk. But I can't for a moment suggest you pay 60 dollars for the privilege. There are plenty of similarly priced games that do every single thing better and don't ask you to wring before they offer fun.
I need a video review before I give my opinion. If its anywhere as awesome as the previous AvP game was, I'll love it.
What? I love the aliens universe.
And that 'review' was really, really brief. I could type that in like 2 minutes. *hint do video reviews hint*
What? I love the aliens universe.
And that 'review' was really, really brief. I could type that in like 2 minutes. *hint do video reviews hint*
It actually isn't anywhere near as awesome. AvP had a handful of questionable design choices that in many cases undermined people's opinions of the game. Colonial Marines has a handful of good ideas bound together by bad choices.michael87cn said:
Not saying you won't enjoy it at all. You'll just have to really dig.
For example, as a huge fan of Aliens, I was delighted getting to finally explore key locations from the film; some of them are faithfully recreated. When the door to Hadley's Hope opens for example, you're treated to a near perfect remake of the scene from the film.