The Aliens movies are a bit of an enigma. They set the precedent for space horror and alien nightmares. HR Giger, Syd Mead, Ridley Scott and a slew of other well-known conceptualists worked on the series, breathing life into the genre and creating what many of us know today to be the iconoclastic view of space creatures. Little green men these were not.
Blood-thirsty visions of Hell, though, they were. And as pivotal remnants of a bygone sci-fi era the genre hasn’t moved much past them, even though we’ve now grown accustomed to more modern versions of space marines and insect queens. What started as singular horror has morphed into wars, epic journeys, space zombies. Now, more than thirty years later, we take a return look at what solidified this genre with the first canonized gaming sequel to the phenomenal Aliens, hopeful to recapture what made the series so great: terror, fear, and unbridled chaos.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is being deemed the “narrative sequel” to Aliens, picking up the story some months after the (spoiler!) nuclear blast at the end of the film. And, because the story is still being worked on, they didn’t have much to show us by way of the plot development. What they did show was the technical design of the game, focusing on recreating scenes from the film in precise detail. The Hadley’s Hope facility wasn’t completely destroyed, and now stands infested by xenomorphs. Intentionally putting the game in first-person view makes the player a bit more faceless, in an effort to focus on the idea of a team instead of a “hero”.
As the demo starts, the marines are exploring the remains of the colony, coming across visual cues, like labs and rooms filled with jars of aliens, that seem to be ripped from the film itself. It’s almost trying to be overly perfect in its representation, potentially to not give fans of the film too much to criticize early on. In fact, the development team was given access to many of the series production assets, making the jump to game that much more convincing.
As the marines move slowly through clawed-open doors from room to room, they seem to experience all of the cliche Metroid design elements: red rooms indication fire, blue rooms, ice and cold. It’s at least different than the worlds of Dead Space, where cold, metal corridors rule. The clear emphasis on lighting and shadow play is important; out of the corner of our eyes we see a silhouette run past a wall. The lights flicker just at the right time, filling in our mental blanks for what might be behind the next wall.
Walls. While there were several of them placed strategically throughout the corridors of the colony, the nasty beasts came from the vents above. In one scene, a xenomorph grabs a marine that had stopped to take a scientific reading and pulls him into a ventilation shaft, silencing him instantly. This ignites a firefight between human and alien, with the marines being vastly outnumbered. Thanks to the handheld (on screen) motion-detecting radar, the marines can see where the creatures are going to enter from.
“Before you even ask, we’d like to say that we’re extremely honored to be developing the game for Wii U. We currently have it running on the dev kit back in our studio.” With the game already previewed to several audiences earlier in the day, the team at Gearbox had been fielding questions about the ability to stream the HUD and motion detector to the Wii U’s controller. The statement was an attempt to stave off our hungry questions without revealing too much about their intentions for the game on the new console. It didn’t directly answer our niggling questions about how the game would work, but the statement was damning enough (in our minds, at least).
Back in the demo, our lead marine is attacked by a xenomorph, dripping saliva-filled mouth and all, and fights it off of him before sliding under a closing door to escape. The room the team is now in is the familiar shipping bay, filled with the film’s sentry turrets and mech suits. In an available co-op mode, one teammate can man the turret while another pilots the mech suit, fighting off swarms of monsters. As the creatures make their way into the room, they crawl around, under, and through storage boxes and grates. The swarm gets heavy, until a massive Queen rips into the room, causing the scene — and demo — to end before resolution.
I’m interested in what Gearbox can do with the game, since previous Aliens outings haven’t proven to be much more than mediocre. If the studio can take what the’re already technically achieving, the visual style and assets from the film, and add in a strong story that would make Ridley Scott happy, then the game could be a solid outing welcomed by fans.
Images courtesy SEGA/Gearbox
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