Aliens: Colonial Marines Review

The environment art deserves rescuing from this. Hadley's Hope and the Sulaco are rebuilt with real care, down to the light fittings and the stenciling on the walls, and walking those corridors is the one moment the license pays. Everything staged inside them fails. The xenomorphs run in straight lines, bunch in doorways and lose track of you at close range, which turns the most frightening creature in the films into something you back away from and shoot.

The marines beside you walk into walls and fire through them. Much of the campaign is human soldiers with rifles, a strange way to spend an Aliens license. Lighting, texture work and effects are plainly poorer than the builds shown at trade shows for two years running, which is what turned a bad game into a consumer story and, eventually, into a settled suit and disclaimers bolted onto old trailers.

Four years later a player found the cause of the enemy behavior: one word misspelled in a configuration file, so the routine that hands the aliens their positions and patrol zones is discarded silently at load. A single letter, still unpatched. The plot brings Hicks back from the dead and does nothing with him. The care in the set dressing only makes the rest read worse.