Which Is Worse, Aliens_ Colonial Marines Or The Walking Dead_ Survival Instinct_
By Alex Chen | January 01, 0001
It’s hard to say which game is the best of 2013 so far. But two games are in a dead heat for worst: Aliens: Colonial Marines and The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct Kirk was blunt about his thoughts on The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct: he thought it was the worst game he’d played all year. But how awful are we talking here? Worse than, say, Aliens: Colonial Marines, which I hated so much it caused me physical pain to play? Time to compare the two games and find out.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); https://kotaku.com/the-walking-dead-survival-instinct-is-the-worst-game-i-5991559 First, a quick recap on what made Aliens: Colonial Marines so unpalatable: It fails at being an ‘authentic’ Aliens experience by downplaying tension and atmosphere. It doesn’t touch on any of the deep themes in the films. Women, typically the heroes of the films, are also barely present. It’s also not a very good shooter, often forcing you to mindlessly mow down a ton of idiotic enemies. It feels like an insulting game, in that the expectation is that Aliens fans will simply gobble the game up because it features some characters and iconic weapons and locations. Not everyone will experience this, but after a few hours, the iconic gun sound effect can feel grating enough to give you headaches. A quick recap of what made Survival Instinct the worst game of the year for Kirk: So ugly, it looks like an Xbox 360 launch title. The combat is a drag thanks to zombie punching and zombie group-hug-grapples. The game makes you sweat, which is kind of gross. The level design often makes it so that the player is cornered and dies, and objectives are often placed in stupid places. (There are a couple of others, but I go into them in this article/flesh them out from my perspective.) It’s important to note that I didn’t walk into Aliens expecting it to be bad; I found this out along the way. I can’t say the same for Survival Instinct: I’d already read Kirk’s scathing takedown, so I expected the game to be unpleasant. I mention this because I can’t help but wonder if the expectation that something won’t be very good changes the way you look at it. Make no mistake: Survival Instinct isn’t a competent game. It’s buggy, it’s ugly, and you shouldn’t play it. And yet Survival Instinct sometimes seemed to go between “lousy” to “so bad it’s kind of good.” The game starts with a tutorial in which zombies end up killing you, like Kirk described. That’s kind of stupid, but it also managed to instill a fear of the undead, too. I got swarmed because I took a shot at a zombie, and guns are noisy. My most powerful weapon is also the most dangerous to me. Which is to say, I sometimes felt vulnerable while playing Survival Instinct, which is more interesting than playing a game where you barely ever have to take your finger off the “shoot” button, or alternatively a game where you never have to shoot at all (both describe Aliens!) https://kotaku.com/the-aliens-in-colonial-marines-are-so-stupid-you-dont-5983709 But I only sometimes felt this way. Other times, particularly if I was going one on one with zombies, this would happen: At first, I was in disbelief that that’s how you kill what is otherwise a fearsome foe. I mean, they single-handedly destroyed civilization, right? But eventually, having to kill zombies that way just became hilarious. Really? That’s how I deal with my problems? It felt like my hammer or knife could just as easily be a huge fish I slap zombies with until they go away. Slapstick, almost. Where Aliens has an early moment in which I feared the Xenomorphs and then devolved into a mindless shooter, Survival Instinct has this strange tension between giving me moronic enemies that weren’t a threat, to completely overwhelming me with swarms of zombies whenever I completed an important objective. Sometimes, I’d get into a big zombie group hug where every zombie waited their turn for me to stab them in the head. That’s not good design by any means. As silly as it might sound, I prefer to have to deal with the combat in Survival Instinct than to shut my brain off as I bulldoze my way through enemies in Aliens. Either encounters were silly, or they were full of tension (because Survival Instinct isn’t balanced). Better than boredom. But neither are preferable to, you know, a good game. But I say this as someone that didn’t experience very many enemies like the ones in this video, where we see a Xenomorph stuck in place, seemingly playing an invisible piano. I’d probably have found Aliens to be a better experience if I ever came across aliens like that. Is that strange to say? To think a game would have been better if it had been worse in certain ways, like giving me morons for enemies? Comparing these two games reminds me that there is indeed an art to being terrible; look no farther than the cult-classic film, The Room.