10 GENIUS Concepts Wasted On Buggy Video Games

Seeing a developer pick up the Alien licence should evoke feelings of excitement, but after Colonial Marines, my reaction is now a kneejerk “get away from her, you BITCH!”.

Though the later Alien Isolation would do a fantastic job of recreating the authentic Alien survival horror, Colonial Marines didn’t do even close to the same for that the authentic Aliens action-horror (Alien and Aliens, any fan will tell you, are part of completely different genres which deserve totally different game treatments).

The tumultuous development and shocking handling of marketing (with Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford even flat-out lying about features and levels of detail which would never be in the game) sadly transferred to the gameplay, which was less scary than a Labrador puppy eating trifle - the much-touted “hive AI” of the xenomorphs seemed to amount to little more than several of them spinning rapidly on the spot, waiting to be shot, and the occasional “straight-jacket Alien” awkwardly fidgeting around with a clenched backside like it was attempting to get to the toilet before the aubergine jalfrezi bested it.

Throw in some utterly abysmal set-pieces which occasionally just flat-out crashed the game, and you have a Giger-inspired monstrosity revolting for all the wrong reasons.