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Colonial Marines
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See, dread is something Aliens: Colonial Marines absolutely needs to succeed. It needs to scare you. It needs to make you feel like you're there. You need to feel like something is at stake and, crucially, you need to feel like those xenomorphs are going to rip you to shreds if you stuff it up. This isn't a technically impressive game - even on a top-end PC running the game at 60fps it didn't look cutting edge by any stretch of the imagination - but it doesn't need to be, so long as it makes your skin crawl.
Which it does, until your first encounter with a xenomorph. Spotting one for the first time after a slow, dreaded crawl through Hadley's is a chilling moment.
But then you shoot it and it dies. Just like that. It goes down like a sack of crap amid billowing green stuff. Then more of them come and you shoot them. Suddenly you feel like a god, which frankly, is a bit disappointing. Obviously you're a marine, but the sense of barely prevailing against insurmountable odds diminishes as soon as you're mowing xenomorphs down with an automatic rifle. It's just not scary anymore.
Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't a survivor horror game. It's a first person shooter with unprecedented license to play with and expand upon its beloved source material. It feels divided between horror and the usual military-shooter power fantasy, but whether it succeeds at either of those is unclear as yet. The best moments of Aliens thus far are the parts where you're doing nothing important.
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