I've been looking forward to this review and I was not disappointed. Alex's editorial brutality is a force to be reckoned with. If anything I would rather rewatch every single Alien movie back to back than play 4 hours of something so unrefined. It's times like this that I wish Alex still ran Screened so I can get a sweet Here's What You Missed video for the Alien film anthology. As bad as this game sounds something about that style reignites my interest in some of the best sci-fi horror in the history of cinema. Thank you and keep up the great work.

@rox360: actually i know what it means and use it accordingly

they've been pandering to throwaway games that give the initial appeal of awe but do not follow through with it at all, have no production value, and no lasting appeal. most of their game of the year lists were comprised of games like this. they have no standards for their review so they reference their "experience" as if it is some one-off feeling that reviewers tend to get when their attention span has been reduced to nothing over the lifetime of judging a product made for children

Game over, man! Game over!

I'm still going to rent it. I just need to know!

Come on, Gearbox! Seven frakking years?

It looked pretty.

That's about as positive as it gets.

So... what's the spoiler cameo?

@alkusanagi:

I know I'm in the minority here, but Prometheus was one of the best movies I saw last year.

Man, this is really depressing. I can't believe Gearbox messed up so badly on the development of this game.

Man, this makes me so sad. The idea of this game seemed awesome and I didn't want to believe all of the negative things I heard leading up to the release, but now that it's out, I don't even know how to express my disappointment.

The quick look that went up last night was more than enough to predict this review. This game is dull, dumb and lack luster. First they retcon the space ship where it has no reason to be, retcon the same version of Bishop that is another planet, they retcon the facility that would have been leveled by the nuclear blast and finally they retcon the aliens in after they had also be vaporized in a nuclear blast. The story alone is train wreck of stupidity. But than to see Ryan spend over an hour shooting generic soldiers with AI so bad, that it looks like a game from 2001. What a stinking pile.

Having never watched any of the films from the series, it was an interesting read how they appeared to have relied too much on the success of the film franchise as a whole with multiple references and not make it something that could stand by itself within the universe. Poor development does not help. It's a shame that the potential of a great story and game was lost.

Starting off the site launch right with some Navarro rage.

This review is pretty spot-on with the SP/Co-op-side, but IMO the competitive MP is a lot better than the small and vague paragraph dedicated to it lets on.

Once you have a few Xeno levels to unlock some new moves/mutations/etc. and get the hang of the slightly janky wall climbing, you're pretty strong. Hell, I'd say the Xenomorphs are the OP ones here.

As for modes being unbalanced and favouring one side over the other, I don't see the problem. Especially on the objective-based maps and when a match consists of a round on both sides. On, say, Survival, the objective is to survive the longest against the Xenos, hence the name. It's not supposed to be easy for the CMs to live for the full 6min or whatever when death is permanent.

While I'm pretty bummed with how this game turned out, and would love to punch out Pitchford for all the lies he's spewed for this game, the MP at least saved it for me and offset the pain of handing $32 over to Sega/GBX. In its current state, I'd give this game 2 stars, a soft 3 after they patch the hell out of it.

I love reading all the Giant Bomb articles, but Alex easily comes across as the best writer of the bunch.

Yep, as with a lot of games based off movies, you might as well just watch the movie as they are usually better.

Brothers in Arms is freaking brilliant.

Well, the answer to that was completely obvious to anyone who was watching. They felt they had a duty to the viewers to show an actual alien in this Aliens game, and since the first 46-47 minutes of that quick look had exactly zero aliens in it, the whole thing ended up running way longer than they had planned. Hence why the discussion strayed so far away from the actual game while they were showing it. There was simply nothing new to say after a while. This game is like a power failure during the Superbowl.

Hot damn, @alex, you are truly at your best when you dislike the game you're reviewing.
Fan-fucking-tastic write-up!

@sharpless: didn't Gearbox just pick up Duke Nukem and Aliens to finish them?

It's pretty retarded how they handled the aliens....

well at least reading the review was fun. I was hoping for a good Aliens game too though.

BRB, going to watch Alien and Aliens.

Thanks, Alex.

Sorry, Drew.

Sad that this game sucks so much.

A great way for Alex to start the year in reviews than with a one star game. Gearbox what are you doing? First Duke and now this, don't be resurrecting anymore games from now on.

They've been PANDERING to them?

All you're demonstrating is your own inability to accept that some people don't see portable or mobile games in the same light you do. Every time they've had developers submit top 10 lists at the end of the year, those developers have always had a few little-known flash or mobile games on their list - I guess the people who make your games are all "pandering" fuckwits who don't know what they are talking about, either.

Goddamn, what an intemperate douchebag.

I like some of what Gearbox does (I beat every piece of BL and BL2 DLC released at least once) but I now know to never trust what Randy Pitchford has to say about a game he is making.

If he knew it was bad and still promoted it I understand that was his job and he had to do it, but how many times do you expect to try to get us to give you money for products this bad before people ignore you and see your voice as unreliable?

If he had no idea this was terrible then how can I trust your taste in games when you say something is god in the future?

It starts to become a case of being either a liar or ignorant of what a quality product is and neither of those is particularly desirable in a salesman.

Still gonna rent it.

@birthwild said:

I second the return of reviewer avatars. Love the rest of the redesign though!

@nekrokreuz: Whoa, I liked Prometheus but lets be serious, that movie has script issues.

Not Aliens. The previous Colonial Marines that was canned was an entirely different game. This was their game from the start - or at least it was supposed to be, instead it seems they took Sega's cash and farmed it out to inferior studios.

See I think they knew this was going to be shit so they really pushed the hype to make the $ on the pre-orders. Success I think. What did we all learn? Never pre-order.

@delorean99947: My impression reading up on this situation is that Gearbox offered to do A:CM for Sega and in the process got an Obsidian developed Aliens RPG shut down. Gearbox has been pushing the game back for years, got Borderlands out there, it became a huge success, and A:CM became a distant concern because they wanted to get Borderland 2 out. Eventually they farmed a lot of it out to other companies, kept pushing it, and then, when Sega was likely getting ready to pursue legal action against GBX for not having a game ready, they pushed this out the door to keep that from happening.

It's pretty disgusting, especially the way Pitchford made this sound like it was going to be an amazing experience and how he sat in Ridley Scott's office and read the Aliens bible and how GBX are supposedly huge fans of the Alien universe. I really hope this hurts them in the long run especially after doing pretty much the exact same thing with DNF.

Sounds like I should just go replay Aliens Infestation instead. Now that's a good Aliens game! It manages to be incredibly tense (even on that tiny DS screen) because of the permadeath elements and the fact that even normal enemies will fuck you up if you aren't careful.

Plus, you can unlock Bishop's knife trick as an arcade game! Awesome, right?

Not terribly sure this is related, but the bicep of the guy in the picture looks like a Xenomorph.

Oh god please no. Please tell me it's not Paul Reiser.

Apparently all of the footage that they used in promotional things like at E3 wasn't even in the game. So people bought this game sight unseen based off of lies, deception, and I assume that there were review embargoes in place to prevent the press from telling people how shitty this product really is. Brings up an interesting thought of is this false advertisement. I mean the game was the number 1 purchase on Steam the day before release and they didn't release ANYTHING that was true to the final product that people ended up getting. The only thing they did get for their money was a shitty game and a stupid fucking gun.

Stop pre-ordering things you dopes. All you're doing is contributing to bad business.

A star for every innovative / exciting concept presented in this game...

Looked up the "spoiler cameo" and it's a doozy. Not quite sure how it fits into the Aliens universe or how it retcons the next film. If anyone wants to spill all the details in spoiler tags, feel free to PM me.

Still cannot believe Aliens is not only a generic corridor shooter, but a broken, incompetent corridor shooter. How do you fuck up an almost foolproof concept?!

Woah. Didn't see this one coming.

With the amount of money and time wasted on this game I'm surprised it even gets a star.

@krakn3dfx: Really the takeaway is fuck Randy Pitchford. Dude is toxin for the video game industry.

The general crapness of this game will never stopp bumming me out.

Can't believe this still happens in 2013...where are the Game Testers??!

Prometheus is at least beautifully shot, if not anything else.

And no, there isn't anything else.

@rcath: The deleted scenes helped clear up quite a lot and make some of the more hammy lines more believable with the added context. In particular the "father" line, doesn't seem like it's just so completely forced and coming out of nowhere.

Have you watched them? I'd love a directors cut with most of them added in there.

This game is getting pounded by critics. It seems to be an easy outlet of reviewer angst, targeting a bad game with bad review scores so that when those reviewers can feel better about themselves when they are inevitably forced to give sevens to games that deserve much lower, if not for their expensive marketing campaigns.

Not that I'm calling out Alex, he'll score bad games everywhere he sees them. But the dogpiling by the media at large is looking like a desperate attempt to regain credibility.