I’ve been playing this game over the last few days, about a month after I first bought it. I’m sure you’ve heard by now what everyone’s been saying about it: It’s crap. I wouldn’t know as I only played the opening mission the day I bought it, and that wasn’t long enough to find out for myself how bad it was. From what I could tell, personally I didn’t think it was all that bad. In fact, a lot of it seemed to play out like the Marine campaign from Monolith’s Aliens Vs. Predator 2. And that came out in 2003.
But the other day, Gearbox released a 4 GB patch. So after that downloaded from Steam, I decided to fire it up again and see what changed. From what I can tell, none of the flaws are apparent. It’s actually a pretty decent FPS now, set in the ALIENS universe. And that’s really all I wanted from it anyway. Sure, it’s not going to revolutionize the genre. But for what it is, I was pretty happy with it.
I don’t have much of an idea of what the game was like before the patch, but here’s what I noticed. One of the more recent additions was a filter to make the game’s images look grainy (a la the film stock used in the 1986 movie). Textures and character models seem better, and collision detection has been improved. So no more of characters getting stuck in walls or running in place like so many were reporting. A.I. has also been tweaked. So friendlies do a better job following you around and covering you, while enemies are more aggressive and seem to sneak up behind you and flank you.
Most of all, the game seems REALLY hard now! You have to be really careful and on your toes, because one wrong move can quickly spell instant death for you. One of the bigger complaints I heard was that it was too easy; partly because of the reportedly brain-dead A.I. and partly because your character was maybe a little too resilient. That’s changed now, apparently. Between the new, improved and more aggressive A.I. and your revised damage model, you’re going to find yourself dying a lot. As a result, confrontations with xenomorphs - not to mention Weyland-Yutani mercenaries - end up being the hair-raising and intense encounters fans were expecting.
So if you maybe passed-up on this game first time around, or were just taking a wait-and-see attitude towards it, this game may now be worth some reconsideration. Of course, obviously some people on the internet are never going to be satisfied no matter what Gearbox does. And this patch probably won’t mean much to them. But as someone who loves ALIENS, I think now it’s definitely worth playing in its current form.
I should note: If the mention of Steam didn’t make it apparent, I’m playing the PC version. Don’t know if results are similar on the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions. I know a patch was released for them too. Your mileage may vary. But I’m one of those guys who’s always believed FPS games are best played on a PC (Halo be damned!)