8 Exact Moments You Knew You'd Bought The Wrong Game

A great game trailer is an art form; we get served these gorgeous, cinematic masterpieces carefully crafted to peak our interest in all the right ways. Sometimes it’s great and all the promises of the trailer give way to a game that matches or exceeds what it showed. Other times, you get games like Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The trailer promised a gripping alien adventure, set against a brooding score we were expecting a tense, high-stakes horror shooter. What players actually received was an uninventive revisiting of all the Alien fan-favourite locations and items with barely a plot to hold it together.

When the very first thing you see in the game is the iconic M41A pulse action assault rifle (yes, the very one Hicks so passionately introduces to Ripley in the original Alien film) you may begin to wonder if this was the game you wanted after all - with no work whatsoever, you’re handed the most efficient weapon in the game, making it completely redundant to bother obtaining and levelling anything else up.

And that summarises the rest of the game: there’s no point. Everything is either a fan-service nod or a depthless A to B mission, with no proper characterisation or interesting mechanics, it’s rather hard to engage with anything at all. It didn’t take players long to realise that this isn’t the game they signed up for, nor is it one they particularly want to play.