10 Terrible Video Games We All Ended Up Owning
2. Aliens: Colonial Marines
Prior to its actual release in February 2013, Aliens: Colonial Marines was one of the year's most anticipated games, with marketing suggesting it would be one of the few worthy games titles on the Alien movie franchise, delivering up a worthy sequel to James Cameron's Aliens, with actors Michael Biehn (Hicks) and Lance Henriksen (Bishop/Michael Weyland) even lending their voices to the project.
Yet Colonial Marines was ultimately released to scathing critical reviews, ripped apart for its generic missions, underwhelming graphics, bug-filled gameplay, and worst of all, its janky Xenomorph A.I. often rendering supposedly tense sequences unintentionally hilarious.
Following the game's release, reports emerged that much of Colonial Marines' development had been outsourced to third parties, and a class-action lawsuit was later filed declaring that players had been misled by earlier gameplay demos which suggested a far higher-quality product.
Despite all this, Colonial Marines was a shockingly good seller, offloading more than 1.3 million copies in its first six weeks on the market, terrible reviews and negative publicity be-damned.
Seemingly for many Alien fans starved of quality video game content, even a dumpster fire like this was better than nothing at all. Thankfully, Alien: Isolation was only around the corner.