Aliens: Colonial Marines Preview

Aliens: Colonial Marines is causing a bit of concern in the office, and in truth has been doing so for some time. Mention the title to any of the assembled staff, most of them already at breaking point from too many deadlines, and the best response you can hope for is a pained ‘hmmmm’. The worst is a full-blown meltdown, replete with senseless babbling and unrestrained crying. 

Why? Well we’re worried that it might turn out, after a thousand years in development, to be utterly, backbreakingly mediocre. The signs aren’t good so far: the E3 showing wowed precisely no one with its mixture of tired genre staples and very little in the way of teamwork. This is Aliens, people: there’s no messing around. It’s got to be great or it’s going to be nothing, rightly or wrongly.

Hence our trepidation. There’s the stunning lack of excitement found in what we’ve seen of the game so far. It’s all very genero-FPS: go here, do that, shoot-bang, canned scare, oh-look here comes a big alien. It feels like a procession rather than the heart-explodingly tense experience it should be. 

Where the blame lies for this we can’t be sure, but given Gearbox’s experience in four-player co-op games (it created Borderlands and its upcoming sequel after all) we can only think that it’s the licence itself that is constraining the developer.

The E3 demo was an exercise in tedium, as Gearbox tried so hard to get every iconic element of the movie in there and succeeded only in reminding us that this has all been done better, and a decade ago to boot, in AVP on PC.

That game had a terrifying atmosphere based around the constant feeling that you were going to die, and that death could come at any moment.

It felt like the game had a pathological desire to end your existence: facehuggers could kill you in an instant, aliens swarmed endlessly and you were often lost and groping in the dark to find your way to safety. Oh, and there were no in-missions saves because f*ck you. 

Compare and contrast that with what we’ve seen of Colonial Marines. Sentry guns? Check. Aliens bursting through barricades? Check. Frightening linearity? Check.

Polished to perfection graphics that don’t convey anywhere near the amount of tension as a ten-year-old PC game? Check. Tedious-looking, rote shooting? Check. It’s just not looking very inspiring at all.

At least some of this can be attributed to over-familiarity: the movie it’s based on practically wrote the manual for FPSs, and over time every developer in existence, from Doom to Gearbox itself, has diluted the raw power of Syd Mead’s excellent design and James Cameron’s urgent direction.

We’ve all seen guns with digital ammo counters, motion scanners, and wise-cracking marines in armour before, what feels like tens of thousands of times.

This isn’t Gearbox’s fault of course, but it’s a similar situation to what happened with THQ’s Space Marine: Warhammer 40K. It may have popularised the power armour vibe that was ruthlessly ripped off, but by the time the game came out all people could see was what looked like a clone of other games.

So with familiarity breeding contempt the action has to be better than what we’ve been shown so far. Gearbox is a talented developer, but there’s a danger that by showing too much love for the series, by sticking to the formula too much will see this fail to be the Aliens game we all dreamed of. And that would be a crying shame.