Gaming w/ Bunneh: Aliens Disappointment

Holei Haziran 02, 2022

This year has managed to help me do a little bit of catch up when it comes to my backlog. Since the first quarter is usually the season where the gaming industry takes a slight break from the blockbuster releases, I figured I would have the time to get plenty of time of games that I wanted to play rather than games that I had to try out.

As you can imagine, gaming with a new addition to the family can be quite challenging. I guess I forgot how hard it is to tend to the needs of an infant and the rest of the family while still getting in decent gaming time where your friends haven't aready gone to bed! The result is me gaming for an average of around 2 hours a day REALLY late in the evening. Somedays I even skip the clack-fest for a few extra hours of shut-eye!

Still these first couple of months in gaming have managed to be quite eventful. January saw a couple of great games that have a bit of a cult following. No Ni Kuni is an oddly named JRPG for the PS3 that has managed to capture the cute and magical nature of Studio Ghibli's multitude of animated wonders. DMC is a reboot of the legendary hack n' slash actionfest known as Devil May Cry. I'm unsure if either of these will see massive sales numbers but the critics' reviews have mostly been favorable. Me personally, I'll probably see about getting them both a bit down the road once I've taken on a few of my own targeted 2013 releases.

One of those games that I knew I had to have on day 1 was Aliens: Colonial Marines. Ever since I heard the announcement that my favorite FPS developer, Gearbox Software of Borderlands fame, was taking on the role of making this game, I had high hopes. I'm quite certain lots of other Aliens fans were as well. Well, people, my first sign of trouble should have been when there wasn't a playable demonstration of the game at Comic-Con. The two different booths seen there only had screens that ran the same tired trailer over and over again. The footage occasionally had footage that looked to be gameplay but it was clear that a lot of it was from cutscenes.

Upon receiving my copy of the game, the feverish pitch of excitement quickly died down after about the first hour to hour and a half of gameplay. The animation for the aliens just seemed 'cheap'. It almost looked like they were sliding around or that they were actually 2D representations of themselves that if you moved to a different angle, the view would snap to a side view. That may be exaggerating a bit but that is how it felt. Don't even get me started on how robotic and blah the human foes are in this game.

Even the usage of the fabled Smart Gun was deflated. You didn't even have to aim the gun. The targeting latches on to everything in the close quarters corridors of the Sulaco so that there is almost no need to even aim. Just shoot! It really makes you wonder.

A part of me just wishes they could do HD versions of all of the AvP games and just call it quits for the franchise until someone can come up with a truly original storyline that introduces either the Aliens' origins or a new related species or something that will up the ante of the storyline as well as the gameplay. Back in the 90's Steve Perry wrote a number of Aliens novels that had a truly riveting story of how the Aliens took over the Earth and how some colonial marines were sent to the Alien homeworld.

These books have plenty of great angles to take on the series that would introduce some suspense into the gameplay. New foes, new tactics, new scares.

Think about it... the first time people heard about Aliens Colonial Marines going to Gearbox, the first thing people thought about was Borderlands! Right? So, my mind instantly started racing to how Gearbox could easily port what they do best in the Borderlands series to the Aliens franchise.

Open world. Co-op. RPG elements. Loot. These are the attributes of Borderlands that keep many players coming back for more. How would any of this work in a scare/thrill based mature Aliens FPS game? Well, I'm glad you asked.

First off, a return to the Sulaco and LV426 makes you wonder what the purpose is. There has to be an overwhelming benefit to returning to it aside from just responding to a distress beacon. They can think of something in order to make it attractive for more than just Marines to go.

Next, there's got to be some way to have a playfield where a swarm or horde of Aliens can come at the players at least once in the gameplay. Using a corridor and having them leap from wall to wall is so blah. I'm talking Two Towers style OMG moments! Give the player access to more than just personal weaponry and give them some really devastating tech to do battle with and I promise you'll have an event to remember. Yes, you'll still need the hive corridors at some point but don't have a majority of the game in this setting. Now whether or not that makes sense for an open world event is another story. You could possibly do it in a manner like you hit the Alien homeworld and long range sensors detect a horde coming from a distant part of the region. You can have a countdown to the horde reaching and you can allow for the players to salvage loot from wreckage in order to build defenses. It can almost become a tower defense style adventure with air or orbital support in the style of Call of Duty killstreaks or Mecenaries support drops and attacks. Failure in this part of the game can lead to a different ending where you must retreat from the planet rather than pushing into the hive.

Room to roam, shoot, and explore please!

Throwing in the RPG elements of the game should be relatively simple. While adding attachments to different weapons was a good idea, NOT utilizing extra moves, weapons, or benefits to acheiving new levels as a colonial marine (in single player) was a missed opportunity. There are clearly different specializations as colonial marines and this could be expanded upon much like Borderlands has done with its different characters. Skill trees are great. Extra moves and abilities (like in Far Cry 3) are better.

As for the loot aspect, this probably can still be omitted without anyone missing it much. The idea doesn't really fit the direction the franchise is or can go. Instead, you can make it a situation where gaining experience with a weapon allows for you to reload it faster, able to alter its magazine size, change different aspects of certain attachments to work better or something of that nature. Kind of a gunsmith kind of skill where a soldier can salvage parts from found guns or damages guns to create better weapons or an all new weapon all-together. Ghost Recon Future Soldier did this beautifully with their system and it led to thousands if not more different combinations as gun types you can use or play with according to your style of play. Work with me people!