Aliens: Colonial Marines Preview

This is my weapon...

In an E3 booth tour, you miss out on some of the things less-employed gamers see. While waiting for a turn to play the Aliens: Colonial Marines multiplayer demo, some of the folks who had waited in line for an hour figured out an entire strategy to the deathmatch we were about to join.

Colonial Marines pits a team of humans against a team of Aliens. The developers took over the Aliens while journalists and show-goers equipped themselves with asault rifles and shotguns.


"We're going to all go with shotguns."

"What?" I replied. The guy who had been waiting in line told me that they'd been watching humans get torn apart by the developer-controlled enemies this entire time. Normally in a demo like this I would have gone with the default assault rifle loadout.

"OK," I said. Sitting down and putting on the headphones, I scrolled the loadout cursor over to one of the shotgun classes available and based my choice on the one that looked the most badass. It turned out the firearm was a rapid-fire model with a fast reload rate.

I absolutely panicked at the first sight of an alien opponent, instinctively unloading my shotty in the enemy's ugly face. The Aliens can climb on the ceiling and leap large distances. If they can keep the human soldiers from getting a bead on them, the Alien team have every opportunity to tear the humans to shreds.


Luckily, our team stuck together and scanned every nook and cranny for the bastards. Shotgun in hand, I dolled out violent retribution to every Gearbox employee in virtual sight. It's always nice to walk away from a demo with a win, but my time with Aliens: Colonial Marines was particularly sweet.

I held down a 1.5 kill-to-death ratio and was the top scorer on the winning HUMAN team. Gearbox has scheduled Aliens: Colonial Marines for a February 13th release date on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. A Wii U version is planned but is currently without a release date.