2Game or not 2Game? Aliens: Colonial Marines

Having been floating on the distant horizon for half a decade, Gearbox Software’s homage to James Cameron’s masterpiece is finally heading our way. As it’s completely unlike Gearbox to delay the release of a game (ahem), we at Made2Game thought it would be a good time to pick Aliens: Colonial Marines apart and see exactly what’s gestating inside its chest cavity. Rather conveniently we’ve found five good points and five bad points, making this article both hugely informative and wonderfully symmetrical.

Read on to see what we’re loving and what we’re not about Aliens: Colonial Marines.

WHY WE’RE EXCITED

A Xenomorph may be involved
Aliens: Colonial Marines is unmistakably 'Aliens'

As Gearbox Software’s CEO, Randy Pitchford says: “To Gearbox and its peers in the industry, Aliens is one of the most influential science fiction properties of all time.” It’s also one of the most recognisable universes, so it’s great to see that so much care and attention has been put into fashioning the environments and character models. If the ambience is as palpable during gameplay as the screenshots and trailers suggest, there’s every chance the game will sell on this strength alone. Dark, foreboding corridors, the ever-present blip-blip-blip of the motion tracker echoing through the gloom, the metallic brrrrrinnnng! of the M41-A Pulse Rifle, and the creeping sense of pregnant menace that at any moment, it’s going to kick off. That’s Aliens, and it looks like that’s what Gearbox have captured in Colonial Marines.
 

Very tough hombres
You’re in full control of your squad

As with the movie, Aliens: Colonial Marines is not a 'one man versus the universe' kind of gig. If Master Chief was involved he’d probably wipe out every phallic-headed Xenomorph on LV-426 single-handedly, but this is not that game. In Colonial Marines you’ll control a squad of four marines and be able to switch between them at will, all the time issuing context-sensitive orders to (try to) keep them alive. Each marine comes equipped with a different weapon, ranging from flamethrowers to the über-cool smartgun, so there’s a tactical element to it all. The sense of camaraderie will certainly help balance the bladder-loosening tension, and being able to actively control any of the surviving bad-asses should incite a sense of caring to elevate them above standard canon-fodder.
 

They’re coming outta the God-damn walls!
Aliens: Colonial Marines is written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle

To those not in the know, Thompson and Weddle are a fairly prolific writing partnership best known for their work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Twilight Zone remake and, most notably, Battlestar Galactica. It’s safe to say they know their sci-fi, know their craft and, if Gearbox have hired them for this then they know their Aliens. You can see from our sub-headings just how quotable the original movie is, and if Thompson and Weddle can bring a fraction of that to Colonial Marines, we’ll be happy. Or they might just do what we’ve done and steal the lines wholesale – but we doubt it.
 

Stay frosty...
Aliens: Colonial Marines supports local and online co-op

The best moments of the Aliens franchise are the bits you can share with your friends – those quotable quotes or set-pieces you go over and over again in the pub. While playing Colonial Marines alone will be a tense enough affair, being able to team up for a bit of two-player couch co-op or go online for some 4-player mayhem will bring out the camaraderie and encourage teamwork to achieve objectives (i.e. stay alive). With any squad-based game, companion AI is always a worry, so the promise of co-operative play is a definite relief. Though there’s unlikely to be a competitive mode, it hasn’t been entirely ruled out by Gearbox.
 

I may be synthetic, but I’m not stupid
There’s no HUD in Aliens: Colonial Marines

To add to the realism and immersion, the FPS-standard heads-up display will be noticeable by its absence. Only a handheld motion tracker will give any indication of where the enemy is lurking and, judging by the screens we’ve seen, there’s not even a crosshair. This is a good thing, as 50% of the battle with a franchise like this is getting the sense of helpless immersion spot-on – hence why 2010’s shatto-rific Aliens vs. Predator was such a stone-cold turkey. We personally like the idea of firing blindly at charging aliens, having no idea how close to death we are during an intense stand-off and not waiting for little blue bars to fill up hide we hide behind tables like pansies. We need to be scared in an Aliens game, we need to be fighting for our lives amidst confusion and panic and overwhelming enemy numbers – and the lack of HUD is one way that Gearbox aim to deliver such thrills.
 

WHY WE’RE NOT SO EXCITED

Get away from her, you bitch!
Aliens: Colonial Marines will feature Quick Time Events

An ominous dun-dun-DUN! should precede every instance of the term Quick Time Event, as they’re oh-so-often the domain of lazy developers who can’t think of a way to integrate a cool set-piece into the game engine, so instead present it as an 'interactive cutscene'. Sometimes they’re cool – the God of War series uses them to make you look bad ass, and Uncharted uses them sparingly to introduce sudden spikes of tension. But sometimes they’re so overused as to be teeth-shatteringly irritating (as in Ninja Blade) or they’re so inconsequential as to be totally superfluous (as in Need For Speed: The Run). We don’t mind a power-loader vs. Queen scrap using QTEs, but we don’t want to repeatedly hammer X and Y or Square and Triangle to avoid spurting acid blood, to stop xenomorphs getting into our elevator or to remove facehuggers every 4.6 seconds. No thank you.
 

Adios, the muchachos
Yeah, erm, didn’t Hadley’s Hope fall down and go BOOM!?

Bit of an elephant in the room, this one. We all remember the end of Aliens, right? Where the atmosphere processor effectively overheated and caused a thermal-nuclear explosion that reduced Hadley’s Hope to a cloud of vapour the size of Nebraska? That happened in the film, ergo it’s canon. As a result, Gearbox’s decision to set Colonial Marines on LV-426 has a few holes in it. There was never mention of another settlement besides Hadley’s Hope, so it’s a safe bet that we’ll be treading those familiar corridors in this game – but surely the aliens nest in the primary cooling towers is well and truly purged? We shall see – and our eyebrows shall remain facetiously arched until we do.
 

Game over, man! Game over!
Aliens games don’t have the best reputation

It’s true, unfortunately. Apart from the Aliens vs. Predator game released on the Atari Jaguar way, way, way back in 1994, the majority (actually all) games connected with the universe have been pretty naff. The most recent offering from 2010 (also developed by Rebellion), was almost universally unloved. Games based solely on the Aliens side of the franchise fair no better (in fact, they’ve been even less popular over the year) – so Gearbox will have a hard time shaking off the stigma associated with the Aliens brand.
 

They mostly come at night. Mostly
There's not a lot of potential for variety

The biggest problem with returning to LV-426 is that (as mentioned above) Hadley’s Hope has been largely destroyed. There may well be locations we didn’t visit in the movie, but having already seen the med-lab, the living quarters, the alien nest in the cooling towers and the unmistakably alien-landscape outside, we’re not likely to shocked and awed by same-old, same-old environments. There’s no greenery in the movie (though it’s not entirely unfeasible that LV-426 wouldn’t have some kind of botanical garden or eco-dome somewhere that wasn’t featured before given that the purpose of Hadley’s Hope was terraforming), very few well-lit areas and an awful lot of corridors, ventilation systems and offices with half-eaten doughnuts. There’s hope where enemies are concerned, as Gearbox have revealed various alien archetypes, like a warrior-caste (the standard nasties), “runners” (similar to the “dog-alien” in Alien 3), facehuggers and at least one Queen – but the environments will need some serious diversity and imagination to keep us interested for eight hours.
 

It was a bad call, Ripley…
Gearbox may be walking a tightrope

It has to be said, the line between homage and imitation is often a narrow one. Unable to base the game directly on a movie we’ve all seen, Gearbox Software have instead opted to set Colonial Marines in the same environment, with what will likely amount to the same characters (there’ll definitely be a Hudson, there’ll undoubtedly be a Hicks, and there’ll almost certainly be an Apone and a Vasquez), the same enemies and (we’d bet our bottom dollar) the same set-pieces (auto-guns, loader fights, fighting retreats through vent-shafts). If Thompson and Weddle’s script is fresh and modern, it might avoid these pitfalls – and we already know that Gearbox is a developer more than capable of surprising us with its inventiveness (the one redeeming quality in Duke Nukem Forever was the insane amount of ideas crammed into its mercifully short play-time). The divide between reverence and copy-catting is a teeter-totter that Gearbox can’t afford to fall on the wrong side of – and unfortunately only time will tell if they’ve crafted a worthwhile spiritual sequel to a classic sci-fi movie, or an also-ran companion that we can all live without.

 

Aliens: Colonial Marines is developed by Gearbox Software and published by SEGA. The Aliens: Colonial Marines release date is currently April 2012.

So what do you think? Do you have an opinion on Aliens: Colonial Marines? Do you agree with what we’ve said - or do you just feel the need to correct our spelling? Either way, feel free to comment in the wee box below.

Words by Mick Fraser (Twitter: @Jedi_Beats_Tank)

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