Reviews

My personal opinion was ruined by initial presentation of the game. To put it simply — Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia sounds like one of those Creative Assembly games aimed at larger, mainstream'ish audience. With that said, Thrones of Britannia may be good, but I was hoping it to be somewhat reminiscent of Napoleon. And I honestly think that the game would have been better this way. Campaign driven, starting from the very small beginnings, explaining basic 4x mechanics until the player is ready to unite the Islands and have strict control over his actions. What we've got now feels more like Barbarian Invasion, or any other expansion that used to be popular within series. I never liked them, cause they usually were more limited in a way that players were forced to choose a specific tactic for a chance to win. As a balanced player, I never was good at rushing and raiding, so that's that. In this case, I simply can't afford the time required to go over all mechanics in Britannia. I'm getting older and busier, thus I did a pause while Creative Assembly was Warhammering and it's probably the main reason why now, I expected to be taken by the hand and led to a Throne. I was thrown upon it instead and it took me hours to figure out stuff that matters within the game. But even then, after hours of playing, one still have to check out new mechanics, to placate backstabby relatives, deal with amounts of peasants in their armies, figure out supply system and such. Again, for someone dedicated, or a fan of the series, this shouldn't be too much of a challenge, as well as I'm certain, some of the mechanics that I felt were important are probably useless anyway. Thrones of Britannia is a nod towards popular entertainment and rejuvenated hype about Viking era, it also focuses on one Kingdom, that is also the largest video game market on this side of the globe. I hoped that Creative Assembly is on a raid for new fans. If that's the case, however, I doubt they'll have any success. I had to battle my desire to run away from a game more than once until I felt comfortable with it. But I'm a patient guy and also not a complete noob.

Heh... Things age does to people. Never thought I'll say this, but this iteration of Total War needed to be simpler and boast deep, long and narrated tutorial campaign. It needs to present the flow of the game through a series of missions or encounters and simply attempt to immerse anyone touching it.
I finally got the grip of it and enjoyed the game, but I couldn't recommend it to anyone without experience in 4x or Grand Strategy genres. Having in mind that Total War used to keep these genres alive, I just feel like lack of newb oriented campaign is a wasted opportunity to really grow them.

Developed at Rebellion by the team responsible for the original 1999 PC classic, the all-new Aliens vs. Predator allows players to take the role of three infamous species: Colonial Marines, Predators and Aliens. The game features a unique three-way online multiplayer experience, allowing gamers to battle for survival and the right to be crowned the deadliest species in the galaxy. Each race also has its own distinct action-packed single-player campaign mode, with a storyline that cleverly interweaves with the other two species’ paths. Set on planet BG-386; a human colonist mining group discovers an ancient pyramid containing a dark and horrible secret. Across the galaxy, a race of warriors is alerted to the discovery of their pyramid and a hunting party is dispatched to ensure that it remains sealed at all costs. Deep inside the ruined pyramid meanwhile, nature's deadliest species awakes from centuries of hibernation intent on finding new prey. The Colonial Marine's story is an incredible fight against all odds from horrors lurking in the dark. Surrounded on all sides yet armed to the teeth, the Colonial Marine represents humanity's last stand with the firepower to fight back. As the Alien, players discover what it's like to be the scariest, most murderous creature in the universe, with the ability to traverse any surface at lightning speed in order to get close enough to unleash its deadly claws, tail and teeth. A master of the hunt, the Predator grants the player an arsenal of exotic weaponry with which to stalk from the shadows. Earn the greatest honor by ambushing prey up-close, before butchering them for a gory trophy kill. Aliens vs. Predator tells the story of a colonial base on a distant planet that finds itself at the unfortunate land of a showdown between a hive of Aliens and a hunting party of Predators. Playing through the first-person shooter as a marine, an Alien and a Predator, gamers will piece together the story of what happened on Freya's Prospect Colony and the U.S.S. Marlow. Packed with weapons, over-the-top trophy kills and special moves. The Predator: One of my favourite species to control, the Elite Predator gets three vision modes, normal vision,(as us humans see) heat vision for the marines, and alien vision. You have all of the predatorâ

Aliens: Colonial Marines presents a fairly convincing facade but its thrills are forced and entirely superficial. You don’t ever feel like you’re actually in danger. You don't ever feel overwhelmed. In fact, over the course of its six hour campaign the game never gets even remotely close to replicating the genuine feelings of fear and dread that simmer throughout James Cameron’s cinematic classic, simply because its xenomorphic enemies are so mindless. These aliens aren’t sophisticated human hunters, they’re merely acid-fuelled fodder for the seemingly neverending rounds in your pulse rifle. Consequently, Colonial Marines is for the most part a disappointingly mundane, run ‘n’ gun first-person shooter that fails to captivate once the initial rush of nostalgia has worn off. At its worst, it simply feels unfinished - which is a surprise given how long it's been in development. . Its campaign plot picks up some seventeen weeks after the disastrous events that occurred at LV-426, with a new squad of marines sent in to explore the abandoned Sulaco spaceship and the remains of Hadley’s Hope. it’s a first-person shooter - and unfortunately a pretty average one at that. The problem lies with the aliens themselves; they’re not smart enough to hunt in packs or take you by surprise, they just wilfully hurl themselves in front of your short, controlled bursts. There’s never a feeling of being outwitted or outmanoeuvred, just outraged that you’ve sat down to take on some deadly xenos in one of sci-fi’s most iconic settings and somehow ended up in the equivalent of a clunky, coin-operated shooting gallery. It certainly doesn’t help that the game also bucks contemporary shooter convention by allowing you to carry all of your weapons at once - a darkened corridor full of xenos doesn’t seem particularly intimidating when you’ve got five kinds of assault rifle stuck down your pants and a shotgun up each sleeve. These shotguns are noticeably overpowered, by the way, and even when faced with the Weyland-Yutani soldiers who at least have a basic sense of self preservation and tend to hide behind cover, you can still easily take them out from a room’s length away with your seemingly rangeless super shotgun. And that’s the campaign in a nutshell; alternate the slaughter of waves of dimwitted xenos with generic cover shooting sections against similarly dimwitted human soldiers, occasionally come upon them both fighting against each other (which makes them even easier to kill since they’re preoccupied), arrive some six hours later at one of the biggest anti-climaxes of a boss fight in recent memory, watch a frustratingly ambiguous cutscene and abruptly roll credits. the way. Even when the game attempts to change things up – such as the level early on in which you’re stripped of all your weapons and must sneak your way through xeno-infested sewers – it completely misfires. These particular xenos – ‘boilers’ – are one of the few new species created for the game, and you kill them by quietly switching on power generators that cause them to throw a hissy fit and explode with rage (literally). This stretch of the game when you're at your most vulnerable should be tense and menacing, but instead it’s strangely hilarious. Certainly if you’re a diehard fan interested in Colonial Marines because its story is supposedly going to be officially considered as canon for the series, then you’re in for a rude shock. Gearbox has set out to answer the question of what happened on Hadley’s Hope after the events of Aliens, but unfortunately that answer seems to be nothing more than an indifferent shrug - there’s no story resolution to speak of, and we can only assume that the actual ending will arrive in the form of paid-for DLC. But it’s not just the woeful AI and disappointing story; perhaps the biggest reason that Colonial Marines fails to impress is due to the fact that so many of the concepts that felt fresh in James Cameron’s movie have been replicated so often in the first-person shooter genre that they now feel like cliches. We’ve been treated to one-man army arsenals in every shooter since Doom, we’ve fought off the facehugger-inspired headcrabs and set up sentry guns in the Half-Life games, and we’ve bunkered down many times over alongside the wisecracking USCM-eque soldiers in the Halo universe. The videogame industry has been openly stealing from Aliens for the past couple of decades, and consequently nothing that Gearbox wheels out in Colonial Marines feels new; it all feels derivative and poorly implemented. It doesn’t help that the developer has seemingly invested all of its most original ideas in recent years in its lucrative Borderlands franchise; for Colonial Marines the cupboard for new concepts is noticeably bare. The multiplayer component runs low on inspiration as well. Aside from being able to play through the campaign in four-player co-op (complete with slightly shuffled spawn points for the enemies), there are four adversarial online modes to choose from - Team Deathmatch, Extermination, Escape and Survival. Escape is easily the standout among these, given that it’s essentially Left 4 Dead with aliens and requires a team of marines to hustle their way to an extraction zone, frantically welding doors shut behind them to stave off an opposing team of xenos. This is as close as the game ever gets to nailing the panic and terror you’d expect from an Aliens game; it’s just too bad that with only two maps available in the mode it soon gets old (although again, this will likely be fleshed out if you cough up for the upcoming DLC). Colonial Marines’ multiplayer at least provides something different from the online norm, but the fact that the xenos are slightly awkward to control and feel noticeably less powerful than the gun-toting marines, combined with the general lack of multiplayer features, means you probably won’t stay online for long. Lastly, it would be remiss of us not to highlight the overwhelming technical issues that plague both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Colonial Marines, presumably since at least part of the console duties were outsourced to developer Timegate Studios. We’ve grown accustomed to the widening gap in graphical quality between PC and console releases this late in the current hardware cycle, but the console versions of Colonial Marines don’t just look bad next to the PC version; they look bad full stop. Noticeably low res textures, shoddy lighting, screen tearing, rampant aliasing, environmental objects that pop in out of nowhere and vanish again – including the gun in your own hands – it all combines to make for a shooter that’s substantially below par this far into the hardware generation. Clearly when it came to optimising the console game, the developers were too exhausted for one last bug hunt. We know how they feel. THE VERDICT Aliens: Colonial Marines looks like Aliens, and sounds like Aliens, but unfortunately it just doesn’t feel like Aliens. Instead, it feels indistinguishable from almost every shooter you’ve played in the past twenty years. There are some feelings of nostalgia to be enjoyed, but it soon wears off and all that is left is some bog standard run ‘n’ gun action that brings little of note to the FPS table - and it suffers from a severe lack of optimisation on PS3 and 360. Aliens: Colonial Marines has definitely been crafted with a lot of love for the franchise, it just needed a little more imagination - and a hell of a lot more polish.

Aliens: Colonial Marines presents a fairly convincing facade but its thrills are forced and entirely superficial. You don’t ever feel like you’re actually in danger. You don't ever feel overwhelmed. In fact, over the course of its six hour campaign the game never gets even remotely close to replicating the genuine feelings of fear and dread that simmer throughout James Cameron’s cinematic classic, simply because its xenomorphic enemies are so mindless. These aliens aren’t sophisticated human hunters, they’re merely acid-fuelled fodder for the seemingly neverending rounds in your pulse rifle. Consequently, Colonial Marines is for the most part a disappointingly mundane, run ‘n’ gun first-person shooter that fails to captivate once the initial rush of nostalgia has worn off. At its worst, it simply feels unfinished - which is a surprise given how long it's been in development. . Its campaign plot picks up some seventeen weeks after the disastrous events that occurred at LV-426, with a new squad of marines sent in to explore the abandoned Sulaco spaceship and the remains of Hadley’s Hope. it’s a first-person shooter - and unfortunately a pretty average one at that. The problem lies with the aliens themselves; they’re not smart enough to hunt in packs or take you by surprise, they just wilfully hurl themselves in front of your short, controlled bursts. There’s never a feeling of being outwitted or outmanoeuvred, just outraged that you’ve sat down to take on some deadly xenos in one of sci-fi’s most iconic settings and somehow ended up in the equivalent of a clunky, coin-operated shooting gallery. It certainly doesn’t help that the game also bucks contemporary shooter convention by allowing you to carry all of your weapons at once - a darkened corridor full of xenos doesn’t seem particularly intimidating when you’ve got five kinds of assault rifle stuck down your pants and a shotgun up each sleeve. These shotguns are noticeably overpowered, by the way, and even when faced with the Weyland-Yutani soldiers who at least have a basic sense of self preservation and tend to hide behind cover, you can still easily take them out from a room’s length away with your seemingly rangeless super shotgun. And that’s the campaign in a nutshell; alternate the slaughter of waves of dimwitted xenos with generic cover shooting sections against similarly dimwitted human soldiers, occasionally come upon them both fighting against each other (which makes them even easier to kill since they’re preoccupied), arrive some six hours later at one of the biggest anti-climaxes of a boss fight in recent memory, watch a frustratingly ambiguous cutscene and abruptly roll credits. the way. Even when the game attempts to change things up – such as the level early on in which you’re stripped of all your weapons and must sneak your way through xeno-infested sewers – it completely misfires. These particular xenos – ‘boilers’ – are one of the few new species created for the game, and you kill them by quietly switching on power generators that cause them to throw a hissy fit and explode with rage (literally). This stretch of the game when you're at your most vulnerable should be tense and menacing, but instead it’s strangely hilarious. Certainly if you’re a diehard fan interested in Colonial Marines because its story is supposedly going to be officially considered as canon for the series, then you’re in for a rude shock. Gearbox has set out to answer the question of what happened on Hadley’s Hope after the events of Aliens, but unfortunately that answer seems to be nothing more than an indifferent shrug - there’s no story resolution to speak of, and we can only assume that the actual ending will arrive in the form of paid-for DLC. But it’s not just the woeful AI and disappointing story; perhaps the biggest reason that Colonial Marines fails to impress is due to the fact that so many of the concepts that felt fresh in James Cameron’s movie have been replicated so often in the first-person shooter genre that they now feel like cliches. We’ve been treated to one-man army arsenals in every shooter since Doom, we’ve fought off the facehugger-inspired headcrabs and set up sentry guns in the Half-Life games, and we’ve bunkered down many times over alongside the wisecracking USCM-eque soldiers in the Halo universe. The videogame industry has been openly stealing from Aliens for the past couple of decades, and consequently nothing that Gearbox wheels out in Colonial Marines feels new; it all feels derivative and poorly implemented. It doesn’t help that the developer has seemingly invested all of its most original ideas in recent years in its lucrative Borderlands franchise; for Colonial Marines the cupboard for new concepts is noticeably bare. The multiplayer component runs low on inspiration as well. Aside from being able to play through the campaign in four-player co-op (complete with slightly shuffled spawn points for the enemies), there are four adversarial online modes to choose from - Team Deathmatch, Extermination, Escape and Survival. Escape is easily the standout among these, given that it’s essentially Left 4 Dead with aliens and requires a team of marines to hustle their way to an extraction zone, frantically welding doors shut behind them to stave off an opposing team of xenos. This is as close as the game ever gets to nailing the panic and terror you’d expect from an Aliens game; it’s just too bad that with only two maps available in the mode it soon gets old (although again, this will likely be fleshed out if you cough up for the upcoming DLC). Colonial Marines’ multiplayer at least provides something different from the online norm, but the fact that the xenos are slightly awkward to control and feel noticeably less powerful than the gun-toting marines, combined with the general lack of multiplayer features, means you probably won’t stay online for long. Lastly, it would be remiss of us not to highlight the overwhelming technical issues that plague both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Colonial Marines, presumably since at least part of the console duties were outsourced to developer Timegate Studios. We’ve grown accustomed to the widening gap in graphical quality between PC and console releases this late in the current hardware cycle, but the console versions of Colonial Marines don’t just look bad next to the PC version; they look bad full stop. Noticeably low res textures, shoddy lighting, screen tearing, rampant aliasing, environmental objects that pop in out of nowhere and vanish again – including the gun in your own hands – it all combines to make for a shooter that’s substantially below par this far into the hardware generation. Clearly when it came to optimising the console game, the developers were too exhausted for one last bug hunt. We know how they feel. THE VERDICT Aliens: Colonial Marines looks like Aliens, and sounds like Aliens, but unfortunately it just doesn’t feel like Aliens. Instead, it feels indistinguishable from almost every shooter you’ve played in the past twenty years. There are some feelings of nostalgia to be enjoyed, but it soon wears off and all that is left is some bog standard run ‘n’ gun action that brings little of note to the FPS table - and it suffers from a severe lack of optimisation on PS3 and 360. Aliens: Colonial Marines has definitely been crafted with a lot of love for the franchise, it just needed a little more imagination - and a hell of a lot more polish.

Alien Rage describes itself as an “old-school shooter,” yet it uses regenerating health and a two-weapon inventory (plus an infinite-ammo pistol). That’s pretty much the exact opposite of old-school shooter design in my book. What I think it’s trying to say is that it’s hard – and it is, but in the way that repeatedly kills you with cheap deaths. Even on the normal difficulty level (which calls itself “Hard” next to the arrogantly named “Challenging” easy level) there are frequent nasty spikes that throw tons of enemies at you at once. They’re not really tough to kill – headshots are pretty easy to pull off (once you disable the counter-productive auto-aim) and they’re dumb enough to round a corner in single file, but their weapons deplete your small health pool extremely quickly. The worst part is the grenade launchers. Alien Rage’s most common enemies pack one attached to their rifles, and obviously so do the dedicated grenadiers that look like Big Daddies, and as a result there are explosions happening pretty much all the time. That wouldn’t be so bad if hiding behind something would shield you from an explosion happening on the other side of that thing… but in alien Rage, splash damage shockwaves travel directly through any solid object. There is no hiding from them, unless you not only take cover, but stand about 10 feet behind that cover. Considering the tiny amount of health you have, that leads to a whole lot of one-hit deaths. I like a challenge, but not when the challenge involves learning to avoid being killed by something really stupid. It wasn’t until about halfway through the 12-mission campaign that I unlocked the perk that boosts your health by 50%, and only then did things start to become anywhere near balanced. Suddenly I had a chance to recover if a grenade hit me instead of being instantly killed on the spot, making progress much easier and the choice of which perks to equip not actually a choice at all. Levels are set almost literally in an exploding barrel factory in space, which also contributes to the frequent and graphically underwhelming explosions. You have to slog through a few different settings – from a mining facility to underground caves to an alien ship – but they’re all the same dull gray metal color, making each one virtually indistinguishable from the last. I missed a good chunk of the backstory, since it’s hidden in hard-to-spot audio diaries. They tell a not-too-terrible tale of cultural misunderstandings that led to the alien attack, and they made me wish that the writing and acting going on in the here and now was anywhere near as competent. Super-cheesy dialog, including an alien boss’ garbled noises translated into “Say hello to my little friend” and references to a guy hiding under a box and sneaking around, falls flat. I’d give you an estimate of how long it took to beat, but it’s going to vary widely based on your shooter skill level and how many times you have to repeat a section until you reach a checkpoint or learn to dodge a bullet-sponge boss’ missiles. In certain areas, it took me a dozen attempts before I was able to pick off each of the enemies as they spawned like Bill Murray in an action movie version of Groundhog Day. A bland shooter like this seems like it might’ve been okay in multiplayer, but the servers are a total ghost town. I’ve yet to see a game with more than a couple of other people in it, and all of these maps are built for eight or 16 players, resulting in a complete absence of fun. Even if there were people to shoot, you’d be doing it in the most painfully plain deathmatch and team deathmatch modes using weapons that are never anything more than mundane. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done just as well – or significantly better – in virtually every other half-decent multiplayer shooter you’ve played in the past five years. THE VERDICT What game were we talking about again? I’ve pretty much forgotten Alien Rage already. Between its lack of personality or distinctive, original features of any kind, and completely non-existent multiplayer community, the only memorable aspect is its annoying and frustrating difficulty spikes.