I recently bought this on steam with a bundle of other Alien games for cheap. Aliens is one of my favorite movies and I’ve played a lot of the games based on the series. I passed on Colonial Marines when it was initially released due to the bad reviews.

I’m about half way through and I am enjoying it. So far it’s fairly true to the Aliens franchise. It’s not a great game, but it’s not as bad as the reviews lead me to believe.

I think my biggest complaint is they screwed up the atmosphere by adding the rank system and challenges. In a good alien game, you should be constantly scared of an alien jumping out and killing you. Instead of checking every corner, or enjoying the scenery I was constantly looking for dog tags, or trying to figure out how to melee kill five enemies in a mission. Seems like a common problem in a lot of games these days.

I like the weapons upgrades idea (although all the magnified optics sucked), but they should have done it a different way that didn’t distract so much from the actual game.

Second complaint is I don’t like checkpoint saves.

Is this a case of a game being shitty at release and fixed in later updates?

Part of it is that enemy AI was massively broken on release.  To the point where they would just wander around and ignore you, or just charge straight at you with no regard for stealth.  This turned out to be as simple as a typo in some AI settings that completely broke what was supposed to be a game with a tense, "smart" AI that would sneak around and look for ways to attack you when you weren't looking.  This one screwup went unnoticed for years, until it was found and fixed by a modder (And, I believe, later patched into the official game).

Broken game on release, broken because there was not the level of care taken with it that would keep them from finding and fixing Tether spelled Teather, where playtesting should have shown that the AI was not working correctly and had them looking into why - not kicking it out the door anyway.

On top of this, there was a vertical slice/gameplay demo shown during a gaming convention that was nothing like what the final product was.  Way overpromised.

For me it was the story

From a lore perspective it didn't make any sense. If WY had a PMC big enough to take on a branch of the US military then why send in the CMs during the 2nd film?  If I was Burke I'd be pissed!  How they brought back Hicks, and the convoluted way they explained it with Stasis Interrupted ... It would have been more believable to bring back Hudson.  Bella, and O'Neal.  Keyes, the ultimate Blue Falcon!

Now with that out of the way, I like shooting aliens with pulse rifles, and the game is still on my PC      

Part of the problem with Aliens Colon Marines is that you have to back up to before the game was released to understand the massive disappointment the game had.

Before release Gearbox was hyping the game like mad, calling it a "passion project" and showing off a video that was supposed to have been in game footage. But once the game was released everyone came to discover that the project was anything but a "passion project" for Gearbox... in fact they had pocketed all the money Sega gave them and completely subcontracted the game out to another studio for peanuts. The beautiful video they showed off as an example of in game content was 100% fake. Gearbox more or less fucked Aliens fans in order to line their own pockets so they could make their REAL passion project: Borderlands 2.

Is Aliens Colon Marines a "bad" game? Yes and no.

Yes in that it is a weak game with (at the time) previous generation graphics and gameplay with a clunky story, made by a "nobody" budget software studio subcontracted by liars, and was released in a state that can only be described as "buggier than a bait store" (including a coding error that was found by a fan that involved a single misspelling in a line of code that completely borked the AI), all sold at a premium price with day one DLC and season pass bullshit to boot.

So if you (like me) saw the awesome sales video they were touting and believed the hype and bought the game on day one... it was SHIT. Absolute irredeemable shit. Randy Bitchford and Gearbox can go fuck start a chainsaw. But everyone slobs their knob because of Borderlands so I guess all is forgiven right? Well in my world the north remembers...

But if you came into this game seven years later, did not know all the bulshit Gearbox pulled, and bought it for like four bucks out of the discount bin, then you'd probably tell yourself the game is "ok".

There is a mod team who have been working for a few years to unfuck the game. They're still at it but you can try the latest release here.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/templargfxs-acm-overhaul

DLC is 29 dollars?!