[H3] Aliens: Colonial Marines trips and stumbles its way into a fun multiplayer mode, however, there’s a feeling this was an accident more than anything else. [/H3]
My willingness to defend Aliens: Colonial Marines goes only so far. I generally don’t look for hills to die on, and while I love the fact Randy Pitchford burned up to $15M of his [i]own[/i] money on the game, I still had to endure the final product. To put it simply: this game is awful, and I need to address the elephant in the room before I go further.
Colonial Marines lacks soul, direction and, strangely for the budget, production values. The game’s asset quality is downright horrendous; character models, weapons, turrets, vehicles and textures look like a 360 launch title. Your teammates look long-since dead inside, and the game’s art direction can be summed up with “it’s blue, it’s sci-fi, and it’s running on Unreal Engine 3”. The lighting does what it can to salvage the game’s look, hiding just how blurry the textures are, but this feels like damage control. Colonial Marines’ ultimate aspiration is to remind you [i]a bit[/i] of the movies, but to say they look similar is perhaps a step too far.
The audio sounds like it’s been taped directly from dying VHS copies of the films. The assault rifle, for instance, has virtually zero bass and sounds like it’s taken from a recording surely no greater than 64kb/s. This is accentuated by the fact that Xenomorphs sponge so many bullets, giving an altogether unsatisfying feeling in combat. The player character, the eponymous [i] Colonial Marine [/i] can take a fair beating too, so it’s not like the Xenos feel like unstoppable creatures to fear either.
It makes it all the more strange that Aliens: Colonial Marines multiplayer is actually [i]really fun[/i]. It still suffers from the problems in the single player - walls are merely a suggestion, for instance, and you will repeatedly clip through the environment. However, the high time-to-kill provides a good bit of balance between both human and alien factions. The campaign is, simply put, a corridor shooter. Yet, the ‘Escape’ game mode somehow flips this into the game’s greatest strength.
The mode has a group of four marines slowly etch through a series of linear rooms to the finish line, completing small objectives to open up the next space while being hunted by the aliens. One death as a marine, and you’re out for the game. Meanwhile, the Xenomorphs have the opportunity of unlimited respawns. It’s tense, fun, and while teamwork is required, the levels are so small that simply timing your attack alongside a non-verbal teammate is enough to make decent innings. The game mode brings the intensity of Left 4 Dead, but removes all the elements that insist on removing control from the player in Valve’s title.
The individualist inside me wants to give Colonial Marines a positive review, especially since I dumped 30 hours into this fantastic game mode. But, sadly, the game is virtually dead. I’ve seen a few Discord groups set up to keep the multiplayer alive, but I’m not sure how confident newcomers would feel attending these, nor how frequently they meet.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is full of glitches, plays like a PS2 movie tie-in and under-delivers on absolutely everything. Still, there goes the best damn multiplayer mode an Alien game ever had.
