14 DAY TRIAL // Aliens: Colonial Marines was launched this week, and almost immediately it became a candidate for Worst High Profile Launch of 2013, with critics attacking the game for its story, its lack of innovation, its limited mechanics, and much more.
Our full Softpedia review of Aliens is more nuanced, showing a game that failed to find a good rhythm for the campaign but has the ability to deliver impressive moments and experiences in the four well put together multiplayer modes.
The initial information about Colonial Marines listed Gearbox Software, best known for their work on Borderlands, as the developer, and SEGA in charge of publishing duties.
Once the critical response started to flow, many scrambled to absolve the listed developer of blame by saying that the actual work for single-player was farmed out to Timegate Studios.
The team has previous experience with Section 8 and FEAR, and then SEGA moved to claim that Gearbox was in charge of the entire experience despite the rumors.
It seems that both players and companies are more interested in distributing blame for the problems that Aliens: Colonial Marines has than in doing anything they can in order to improve the experience as much as they can.
It does not help to scream, via the Internet, at the developers involved about their failures and it’s similarly unconstructive to shift guilt from one team to another.
The game exists and can be judged by all those who buy and play it.
Gearbox, SEGA and Timegame need to take a look at their own work, evaluate their involvement and then offer clear information about their involvement and how they approached Aliens.
They then need to deploy as many patches as soon as possible to solve the fixable problems in Colonial Marines and then maybe issue apologies to the fans who are disappointed.