Aliens: Colonial Marines

[Jarhead0331]

^Never heard of him.

[TheCommandTent]

^Never heard of him.

He has a very scathing, NSFW, funny take on game reviews.  If you can keep up with the speed at which he talks and splashes graphics on the screen it is pretty funny.

[Huw the Poo]

Not that I'd ever preorder any game (not in today's environment anyway), but I'd say they have the MOST right to complain: their money was an expression of trust based on promises made by the devs.

Indeed...

[Greybriar]

^Never heard of him.

Never heard of Yahtzee?! And you call yourself a gamer?  ;)

[jomni]

@grim

Maybe you know this already... But what if someone told you Gearbox did not make the game?
http://kotaku.com/5986694/

[JudgeDredd]

I've seen a couple of reviews of his before.

I wouldn't say they were informative...too much going on, too fast and too satirical to actually really take any proper notice of anything - but I do find them amusing.  :)

[spelk]

Have they actually announced anything about official multiplayer servers?

From what I've seen, it seems to work out if a player can host, and then it uses that player as the host. In many of my MP games of ACM, I've been the host. 

It sounds like it could be some fun, if the Alien control scheme is decent as mentioned.  I recall playing the first AvP long long ago in the far far way and the damn aliens were a pain in the ass to control.  Although that did offer some hilarious laughs when I'd see a buddy running back & forth with an screaming alien engulfed in flames, because it moved so fast he couldn't find the side tunnel to get to cover.  ;D

I can certainly confirm that the Alien control mechanism is a lot better than the AVP game. You actively hold a key (on 360 its the left trigger) to stay latched onto a surface. You can move in all directions once on a surface, and usually at speed if you sprint. The best advantage is that a jump off the surface that you're clung onto performs a powerful leap, you cannot do whilst you're just jumping normally. If you use the latch on key whilst just stood right way up normally, you also can power leap. Essentially, this latching on, gives you a great feeling of power and control. You can leap from surface to surface and you have very accurate control of the process. Clinging onto a ceiling and advancing is very do-able. Dropping from a ceiling or pouncing from a hidden position are skills that you should have after a few games trying them out. Stick a hollow exoskeleton onto a Soldier drone, and you move like shit off a shovel!!

The multiplayer game is the shiny object in the game. It's only limited by the low map count, 4 or 5 I think. And most of the other modes are a bit contrived. The Team Deathmatch is where its at, for team co-operation and alien domination. There is a sort of capture the flag mode, where you have to destroy the eggs in known locations, but obviously this results in utter carnage, because the Aliens know where you will be. Still can be frantically fun. Theres an objective based mode, where you run through several compounds, and the Aliens have to take you out as you try to escape. The marines get an auto-turret. If they're levelled up and heavily customised with fast firing guns, flamers and rocket launchers. As Aliens you have a rough time stopping them. The odds seem stacked too far against the Aliens.

I'll wager when it all comes out that the MP was designed by TimeGate Studios, it feels like a TimeGate setup - following the very underrated Section 8 FPS they did. I have a lot of time for TimeGate Studios, with Kohan, Section 8 and now involvement in this title. I really can't see why the press is overreacting to the game itself. Perhaps the way SEGA managed it, or Gearbox toyed with it, but the game is very playable, it can create tension and exciting set pieces, and the multiplayer is some of the best 6 vs 6 asymmetric team play I've seen. The customisation is just enough to make doing it worth the effort. You can have team classes, with fast but weak Soldier Drones, heavily armour chitin based acid spitters, very powerful leap strikes in the Lurkers, and you have two special types of Alien bosses, a big Tricerotops style charger, and a suicide acid bombing, tough skinned exploder (I think they're called Boilers). You have 5 marines in a claymore riddled defensive position with 360 cross-fire coverage, toting flamers, pulse rifles, and rocket launchers? Then call in the Boiler to acid splash their faces into a pool of gibs! :)

[JasonPratt]

Gearbox themselves have made very high quality games in the past; no one could ever accuse the Brothers In Arms games of utter realism, especially in how the semi-immortal infinite ammo teammate bots played out, but Gearbox worked hard on them.

Back to Yahtzee for a minute, buried in his trademark withering criticism is a salient design point I've heard expressed in different ways from other reviewers: the Marines often seem too overpowered (though I've seen them routinely killed off in gameplay videos), yet much of the thematic point of the original Aliens was to take a supremely confident team who ought to have been wildly overpowered and reduce them to incompetence via Alien attack so that the common-sense Ripley can come in and clean up after them. That was a story design meant to provide a sense of safety for the audience (and maybe vengeance at having been scared so badly by the first movie), then to rip that safety away, even though James Cameron had to cheat on occasion by nerfing the Marines (collect all the ammo, flamers only. "What are we gonna use, harsh language?!")

But it leaves a very difficult balance to strike: the Marines in the movie do kill lots of Xenos, they're just eventually overrun (much like a Space Marines vs. Tyrannid Zerg Tyrannid swarm, by no coincidence whatsoever ;) ) That literally set the template for action-based survival horror forever after! But how does one make that scary in a game? Yahtzee's basic critic (along this line) was the same as his basic crit for Dead Space 3 (a very Aliens inspired game and franchise): too many people helping (or rather, too many people competently helping too often), too much firepower.

But then other people seem to find the game scary-fine as it is...? I don't know.

It does lead me back to thinking of Space Hulk, though. The Terminators have naturally superior firepower, but are carefully balanced by their inability to respond or move very quickly or attack beyond a narrow cone. Flamers, which have a much wider attack?--very limited ammo. (Heavy bolters are too restricted in their ammo, on the other hand, to bother ever using them, at least in the computer version from SSI, but at least the same principles apply: ratchet up the tension by making their use an irrevocable choice.) Any hand-to-hand weaponry doesn't have much better than a 33% chance of winning against a face-on attack, and none against flanking or rear attacks. Space Marines in an area die off and stay dead, hampering the player's ability to succeed--they don't die for scripted reasons.

That game is literally as old as the original Doom, and it seems much scarier than anything I've seen in Aliens: Colonial Marine. On the other hand, at no time did even the Space Hulk missions in Dawn of War 2 (or Kill Team for that matter) scare me in the slightest; but neither were they supposed to.

Of course, ColMar could have been set up to be scarier by making the game a Ripley-ish story. I was fairly scared during the Marine sections of the first Aliens vs. Predator, because I was alone with limited ammo. Sure, I was a Marine not Ripley, but the basic principle was the same. I get the feeling from negative reviews that there's too much of not-that in ColMar. ;)


Allow me to mention another salient example from back in the days of the original Unreal engine: The Wheel Of Time. This was a highly atmospheric game verging hard into what amounted to Aliens territory: even though only a few enemies ever showed up at a time, the player was playing a woman who wasn't combat trained who had to rely on carefully sparse limited ammo (even though her FPS weapons and other abilities were quite varied in principle), in areas designed to take full advantage of what the engine could and could not do. That game often scared me spitless. I have cousins who refused to play it after a particular point, not because of a gross level of violence (which was barely existent), or even because the enemies looked frightening (one artistic complaint was the that Trollocs all looked humorously skinny), but because of sheer game design. (The aesthetic was occasionally broken by laughably risible costume designs, but their mis-designs actually hurt more because the game was so effective in its design otherwise.)

[JasonPratt]

A further reflection: maybe to be a more effective Aliens experience, the player should have been assigned to a communications soldier or a medic, someone who's trained to fight, sure, but isn't really expected to do so compared to the other guys. And then over the course of the game, sure he gets better, but the level-ups are rarer and occur at scripted points. I dunno, I'm spitballing here, maybe the game tries that already...

[spelk]

In Multiplayer team deathmatch the Marines are often overrun by the Aliens side, and after the first wave of attacks have subsided, the team of marines are a bunch of very underpowered singletons trying to find there way back to the other Marines, in the dark, with only their tracker for comfort. Easy Alien meat. The marines only ever present a formidable force when they're in pairs or a full group covering each other. Mostly it's swift deaths. I find the multiplayer TDM so much more effective at providing tense moments than the single player campaign. Having said that the single player campaign isn't without it's 'holy shit' moments, and some eery scrabbling around in the sewer system. No weapons.

[Grimnirsson]

Maybe you know this already... But what if someone told you Gearbox did not make the game?

So what? I don't get your point. The game was done by Gearbox, that was the contract with SEGA. They hired studios to have enough time for Borderlands, which was not what SEGA had in mind I suppose. We don't know which studio did the major part of the game and it doesn't matter because the Gearbox stamp is on the box, that's the one that matters, for SEGA and the gamers. And btw, Timegate did an awesome job with Section 8 Prejudice, that game is far superior to ACM so I highly doubt they had much to do with it.

[Arctic Blast]

Maybe you know this already... But what if someone told you Gearbox did not make the game?

So what? I don't get your point. The game was done by Gearbox, that was the contract with SEGA. They hired studios to have enough time for Borderlands, which was not what SEGA had in mind I suppose. We don't know which studio did the major part of the game and it doesn't matter because the Gearbox stamp is on the box, that's the one that matters, for SEGA and the gamers. And btw, Timegate did an awesome job with Section 8 Prejudice, that game is far superior to ACM so I highly doubt they had much to do with it.

Everyone screwed up here. SEGA clearly wanted the Gearbox brand on the front of the box to sell to Borderlands fans, and just as clearly didn't do much to check on how the development of the game was going. It now sounds like Gearbox farmed it out to Timegate, then brought it back and changed a whole bunch of stuff last minute instead of asking for another extension. Timegate didn't do a very good job on their end, but it also sounds like the development directives from both Gearbox and SEGA were so totally vague as to be useless...and when they weren't vague, you suddenly had 2 different companies worth of overseers trying to steer the ship along with Timegate devs. Mix in 2 other developers who did the MP and this thing was doomed from the start. Every company involved deserves a smack across the face. And in the cases of Gearbox and Timegate, one wonders if this is going to make it a bit more difficult for them to find future publishers for games that aren't part of a well known brand.

[steve58]

Not a game for me, but saw this and though some of you might be interested....

Just a heads up that there a 4GB patch has been released:  http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122774-4gb-Patch-For-Aliens-Colonial-Marines-Improves-AI-Graphics

General
Improved texture resolution.
Various visual improvements.
Added mouse smoothing to options menu.
Fixed crashes tied to launch and motion tracker.
Added additional safeguards to better protect save data.
Resolved an issue where a player's level could sometimes appear incorrect when backing out of a party.
Addressed several scenarios under which players could spawn without a weapon.
Changes to better prevent audio from sometimes cutting out during end of mission cinematics.
Fixed issue where Xeno death animation was not properly calculating momentum of the killing blow.
Smart Gun animation now properly tracks targets.
Addressed some instances where Xenos would display erratic animations.
Increased light radius for player's shoulder lamp.
Adjusted aim assist to better reflect player input.
Addressed an issue that could sometimes cause co-op player revival to not work under certain circumstances.
Addressed issues with players not spawning into a level properly.
Fixed a marine player invincibility exploit.
Resolved several instances where players could walk or fall outside of maps.
Addressed an issue where Ripley's Flamethrower (bonus content) would sometimes fire continuously without player input.
Fixed an issue that could cause localized text to sometimes display incorrectly.
Addressed an issue where weapon ammunition was not always highlighted properly.
General user interface improvements.
Miscellaneous bug fixes.

Campaign
Tweaked enemy and friendly AI to be more aggressive and responsive.
Modified campaign difficulty to account for improved AI responsiveness.
Improved enemy collision detection regarding doors and Power Loader.
Addressed some issues that could cause improper warping for co-op players.
Various tweaks to address instances where NPC characters would not always properly navigate to objectives.
Players will no longer bleed out immediately when downed in a Power Loader.

Versus
Fixed issues that could cause clients to report inaccurate results and statistics.
Addressed instances where a map would appear to "pop in" when loading into a new match.
New Xeno appearance customization added.
Multiplayer teams should now correctly auto-balance between rounds.
Increased duration of Lurker Pounce Challenge "Cat-Like Reflexes" from 10 to 20 seconds.
Fixed issue where certain multiplayer challenges would not unlock properly for all characters.
Crusher pick-ups now correctly appear as highlighted for clients.

[bbmike]

A 4GB patch!? Sounds like they released a new game!

[Jarhead0331]

A 4GB patch!? Sounds like they released a new game!

I wouldn't be that hopeful... :o