Expectations. Sometimes it’s hard to live up to them.
And in the cutthroat world of corporate business, one knows that quality is oftentimes sacrificed in the name of practicality, especially when deadlines loom.
Lost in the middle of all of this are fans, people who are expected to drop large sums of hard-earned cash for what they hope will be an excellent product. Their hopes and expectations are stoked by companies that put as much window dressing and happy-sunshine-rainbows around their product leading up to launch date in order to maximize early sales, when said item is priced at its most expensive.
Ah, capitalism.
In short, welcome to the tragedy and FUBAR mess that is Aliens: Colonial Marines – Sega’s dead-on-arrival first-person shooter that’s available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
If you’re looking for an in-depth review, well, I’ll get to that in a bit. In short, the game’s a colossal mess. And for a title that spent six years in development (a short gestation compared to the decade-long fiasco that was Duke Nukem Forever – which has ties to this particular situation, as well), how we got to this point is far more interesting than developer Gearbox’s lame game.
Fan expectations for this game were huge. The Alien franchise is beloved. And fans have suffered mightily over the years. David Fincher was a hot young director when he got hired to helm the movie Alien 3, but the shoot was plagued by corporate hacks and the lack of a script. And the fourth Alien film, which was helmed by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame, didn’t fare a whole lot better.
Was it any surprise that in resurrecting the film franchise, Fox went back to Ridley Scott, who directed the first film back in the late 1970s? And was it any surprise that he decided to do a prequel that allowed him to reinvent the universe and distance himself from the steaming pile of legacy left by the two directors previous to his 2012 blockbuster?
Well, maybe the video game will get similar treatment in the future. Goodness knows the franchise has taken a body blow thanks to this mess.
For six years, this game bounced between development studios. Ultimately Gearbox, a good studio that has crafted games like the two Borderlands shooters, Half-Life and even was trusted with porting Bungie’s golden goose, Halo: Combat Evolved, to PC, was tasked with bringing this game to market for a 2013 release. However, Gearbox was also knee-deep in prepping Borderlands 2 for market.
The scuttlebutt goes that Gearbox farmed out the grunt work to another studio, which sent them back a subpar game that had few of the features it was supposed to contain. Gearbox, still smarting from being the studio that ultimately released Duke Nukem Forever (which tanked and was roundly – and deservedly – pummelled by fans and critics alike), then apparently tried to salvage what they could in the time they had left before the launch date.
There were already legal threats surrounding the game, given that the project had languished for six years. Who could blame Sega for wanting someone to finally deliver a product so they could try to salvage the money they had invested?
(There is a lot more history to this game’s development and if you’re interested in a peak behind the curtain, check out articles at gaming websites IGN.com or Kotaku.com that can delve a lot more deeply into this story.)
And this is where commerce and commercialism crash head-long into fan expectations and critical evaluation by the general public.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is a frustrating mish-mash of a game. There are nuggets here and there that show just how fun and intense this game could have been. But they are slivers amidst a massive lode of fool’s gold.
The game lacks any sense of intensity. It is not scary, not one bit. The atmosphere has been completely ignored, which is sacrilege in what amounts to a game about guys with guns running around a haunted house as nightmarish creatures hunt them. Imagine a horror game without any horror … no scares, red-herrings, frightening sound effects, spooky music.
And it just gets worse from there.
The action is uneven. The graphics look like something that might have impressed during the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 era. And the story tries to reinvent the franchise, bringing back a character whose appearance is completely unexplainable in any rational sense. I know that some fans (and especially David Fincher) would like to erase Alien 3 and 4 from existence, but this game’s plot twist essentially amounts to another gut-punch to the fans.
The weapons are decent and the sound effects that accompany them are accurate. Wielding the Smart Gun (that badass get-up that Drake and Vasquez wore in the Aliens movie) is damn cool. But that’s about it. Seriously. There’s really nothing else to look forward to in Aliens: Colonial Marines.
There are some awesome Easter Eggs for fans buried in this mess. When you enter Hadley’s Hope, for instance, you’ll find one of the remote sentry turrets sitting where Ripley et al left it, complete with the four rounds that were left after repelling a xenomorph attack in James Cameron’s classic action flick. And you will have the opportunity to pick up and wield several legacy weapons that were dropped by characters from the movie. Picking up Hick’s shotgun (good for close encounters) is pretty cool. As is finding a certain flamethrower amidst the rubble later in the game.
It’s at moments like these that you realize just how badly you wanted this game to rock if you are an Alien fan.
The multiplayer is also a mess. I played the co-op campaign with my son. We were playing on a 52-inch TV and the perspectives for his character and mine were so squished that it was near impossible to play. It sucked away any of the fun that playing co-op is supposed to deliver.
The online multiplayer is only slightly better.
In short, right from Day 1, Aliens: Colonial Marines deserved a much better fate. It deserved to be treated with some respect and reverence. It should have delivered a fright-filled, atmosphere-heavy, intense survival horror meets shooter experience that thrilled fans and critics alike.
Instead, you’ll find yourself wishing that someone had taken a flamethrower to this mess and spared all of us the heartbreak and hassle.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is rated M.
* Wayne Chamberlain has covered the gaming industry since 2002 and is a contributing columnist at Canada.com and Postmedia News. Follow him on Twitter @ChamberlainW. He is also co-host of the Star Wars Book Report podcast, available on iTunes.