Aliens: Colonial Marines is a squad-based first-person shooter in which the player controls four Colonial Marines, each with a different personality and primary weapon. Each player character can carry additional weapons including a flamethrower, pulse rifle, smartgun, pistol, RPG, and many types of grenades. The player controls one marine at a time, issues orders to the others using context-sensitive commands, and may switch between characters at any time.
The game basically put itself on a pedestal as the sequel to Aliens, when in reality only 3 missions are dedicated to aliens and the rest have you facing Weyland-Yutani Mercs. Did I mention there are only 7 levels? Well, okay, I could forgive that if the rest of it would be amazing. Well it isn't, let me explain. Graphics are completely useless when making a game, they could have a made a black pixel, called it an alien and I'd be happy, but here they tried to create an atmosphere that required graphics and failed, with graphical tears on the console versions and the pc version having a problem with framerate stability, and all of them having a lack of effective textures, lack of color, and the overall blandness you'd find in a Call of Duty game. But that's nothing, for me, it's all about the gameplay, story, and characters, in that order, and !WOW! was I disappointed Not only does the AI suck, but on lower difficulties they actually walk slowly into your field of fire and miss most shots, of course that's just the mercs as the aliens are never actually a threat even in multiplayer. Think I'm kidding, all the aliens do is bum rush you at a BRISK PACE! Want me to hit it home? In E.T for the Atari 2600 the enemies are actually a live annoyance and threat to the character and the player as the enemies will do things that would hinder you from winning. The xenos in A:CM are jokes that barely put up a fight, and the Mercs are just damn incompetent and will let you run through the whole level, slaughtering all in your path, only putting up a challenge on the hardest difficulty, but then it's only because they have there aggressiveness, health, and damage power turned up. Really, there is no reason to buy this game unless you're going to play multiplayer, which isn't even that good anyway, the aliens still die easier than the marines and have far fewer methods of actually killing than the marines. The story is throwaway and the characters are too, along with their A.I.