Wow, do I feel like I've been sold a pyramid scheme....

Well, I just finally bought Aliens:CM and played it - I know, a little late to the party, been playing Dead Space 3 non stop recently - and was it the amazing cinematic Aliens video game experience I'd been waiting for? Is it the sequel-in-video-game-form that we've all been waiting for? Is the game I've been waiting six years for? Is it bollocks!

Thing is, I've avoided hearing anything about this game so as not to spoil it, so all the negative reviews have completely passed me by, and I haven't seen any footage of the game - all my knowledge of the game before yesterday ended with the demo they released ages ago, which quite honestly was of a totally different game.

The first thing that hit me when I started playing was how fast the game seems to be running; "Wow, it's running at full 60fps, how the hell did they manage that?!", and then I found out; because every other aspect of the graphics is *beep*

But ok, I'm not a graphics whore, for me this game was going to be about gameplay and story - yeah, I'm one of those. I actually value a story in a game - not strictly, If a game is just incredibly fun, I enjoy it just as much, if that's the direction they've taken it. If a game has a great story, but isn't much fun to "play", I can enjoy it. Games that have great story and great gameplay are the best - games that are terrible in both aspects are the worst. THIS game is one of the latter! For god's sake, they got Lance Henrikson AND Micheal Beinh to reprise their roles from the movies, and they STILL managed to *beep* up the story/cinematic elements...

The gameplay is bad, I mean it's just bad. I lost count of the amount of times I'm walking along an empty corridor, and suddenly drop dead because an Alien has swiped me from behind and killed me in ONE HIT! How the hell am I supposed to defend against that? How is that fun in any way?
Gun shots kill in one or two hits too - ok, i'm thinking, "Ok, they've gone for the realistic approach, that's cool..." only it's not cool, because every other aspect of the game isn't realistic in the slightest, and it's completely unbalanced; if you're going to have game where you can die in 2 shots, then you better fill that game with health resources, or at least a recharging health meter - what have we got? The "3 bar" health system, which is completley unsuited to this style of game! Also, a story based game - which an Alien adaptation, one that was specifically advertised throughout its six year development as being a movie-like experience taking place within the continuity of the Alien movies - should NOT have a 1/2 shot kill system. It's called balance. I don't want to be constantly reloading the same bit only to die over and over again - through no fault of my own - when I want to know what happens next!

But none of that matters since the story is balls, too, so maybe it does balance. But in that case they shouldn't have advertised it the way they did.

Seriously, this feels like a game from 15 years ago. It actually does feel like a 90's game, in fact it doesn't feel that different from the old Alien fps games from then - which I'm sure some people will love, but, forgive me; I wanted a 2013 game. I wanted something like Dead Space, but set in the Alien universe. This game feels like a Half Life 1 mod.

I recently bought the Doom 3 HD release and replayed that (gotta love Doom) and that game, which was an Xbox 1 title, actually feels newer and more current than this. I know they started making this in 2006, but this feels outdated even for a 2006 game! I can actually think of first person shooters from 2006 that were superior in every respect to this; better graphics, better gameplay, and better story. This is just...blah.

I've done some reading up on it, and apparently Gearbox Software pissed about with this game from the beginning - outsourcing it to another studio without telling Sega, still receiving full paycheques from them even though they weren't doing anything. The mismanagement and lack of communication between the Sega, Gearbox and the outsourced devs led to a completely mismatched game that was just a complete mess. They handed it back to Gearbox and then Gearbox scrapped it all anyway, and built the game we have now in 9 months flat. So this entire game was built in 9 months. It shows.

Shoddy, shoddy work.

I'm not really into the Duke Nukem games, but I hear these devs did the exact same thing with that - pissing around making it so they could keep receiving cheques, and when they finally HAD to release it, released a knocked together, mediocre title they built in a few months that looks like it should've been released in 1999.

I'm not a vindictive person, but I actually do hope Gearbox goes out of business; it's this kind of shoddy, unscrupulous, poor game development and business practice that is stopping videogames from being taken seriously and ruining the games industry. When I think of all the decent developers that were forced to go out of business, often through no fault of their own, and all the great games they COULD have made if fate had been kinder - and then look at these *beep* I for one am not impressed. Not impressed at all.

Ok, rant over.

You Dare Agree With Me?!