The dialogue is just as bad and the attempts to mimic the same mix of bravado and camaraderie as the film often falls embarrassingly flat. The plot reads like the worst kind of fan fiction, in its attempts to undermine the subsequent sequels and find a reason to re-stage as many of the original set pieces as possible. Although the artificial intelligence for both is so rudimentary it’s sadly the most authentically ‘80s element of the whole game.Īnd then there’s the script. You know something’s gone wrong when the human mercs are a bigger danger than the actual aliens. The biggest problem though is that the aliens are too easy to kill and take too long to do the same to you.

It’s too fiddly to use and not really that useful, which is no surprise really as it was designed to raise the tension in a movie not act as practical weapon of war.

But it could’ve been so much more, especially as the use of the motion tracker is so badly fumbled. Where the game does better is that it is occasionally quite scary, despite the fact that you’re a heavily-armed space marine and you know exactly what’s out to get you.

And it certainly doesn’t do much to hide the game’s inherent linearity. The mission design is somewhat unusual, in that it often revolves around securing a specific area and venturing out from there, but adding what amounts to fetch quests to the generic shooter action doesn’t feel like much of an innovation.

We don’t normally fiddle with the sensitivity settings in a shooter but here we felt we had to, although things do get better as you upgrade each gun with a sort of Call Of Duty lite range of viewfinders and stocks.īut the fact is for a lot of the time Colonial Marines just isn’t a very good shooter, at least not in terms of the gunplay. This extends to the weapons as well, with the default versions of each being very twitchy to aim. For a game that’s been in development this long it’s a disappointingly buggy and unrefined one. This gives everything an unusually solid look, or at least it does until aliens start glitching through the floor or the screen tears away in front of you. A great deal of effort is expended to make the game look and sound like the movie, including an unusual lighting system that excels at shadows and at making the aliens and their infestation gleam menacingly.

Aliens colonial marines split screen