Sunday, February 24, 2013

Aliens: Colonial Marines. Love you Xenos!

We picked up Colonial Marines last weekend, and just finished the campaign mode on Friday.  Has some glitches, but overall I'm pretty happy with it.  There's some decent movie references thrown in the story.  But the campaign mode is super short!  Story line is clearly set up for sequels...and I guess Gearbox wanted the focus to be the multiplayer versus mode. 

One final note on the campaign mode is that I didn't really like that one objective is to go around collecting these Audio Logs which theoretically add to the story line, but the NPCs keep pressing forward and talking over the Audio Log playback, so most times I had no idea what they were saying.  To me, if they're going to bother sticking the logs in there, they should make allowances to let you hear out the story line.  Otherwise just have me collect dog tags to get my XP and I'll be on my merry way.   

I spent the greater part of this weekend checking out the multiplayer modes.  It's fun but I admit I historically haven't invested a lot of time with online multiplayer in other games, so my perspective is limited.  I feel a little dirty admitting it, but it's way more fun to be a Xeno  (though I have nothing but respect for you Marines, you just don't have cool vision capabilities or mad wall-climbing skills).  One thing that I've found frustrating is the auto-shift of the camera angles during close combat....makes situational awareness really difficult and, more often than not, has led to--dun dun dun dun--certain death!   

The multiplayer on Aliens has motivated me to look into obtaining a bluetooth headset for voice input to better coordinate movements with teammates.  However, based on my track record talking to myself during gameplay, most of my comments would probably involve dropping an f-bomb every time I screw up a kill or die.  Can you get in trouble for that on the network..?

All in all, two thumb's up, and will probably continue playing if for no other reason than to level up and get access better upgrades.  That being said, I'm kinda ready to move on to the next thing.  We're still working on Borderlands 2 and I'm starting to miss Handsome Jack.   Since I'm still backlogged on games from last year, next game on the horizon:  Lollipop Chainsaw.  Byeee!

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