Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Aliens: Colonial Marines Performance and IQ Review

Today we evaluate Aliens: Colonial Marines, which uses the Unreal 3 engine with an updated renderer. Since it is a DX9 game, we expect to see faster performance on less expensive video cards like the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. We'll determine if SEGA is taking a step forward or backwards with the Alien series.

Introduction

Aliens: Colonial Marines is the third game in the Aliens series, and was released on February 12th, 2013. It is a first-person shooter game where players control Corporal Christopher Winter. The game takes place immediately after the events in the third Aliens film. Players will be a part of a search and rescue Colonial Marines team that receives a distress call from the USS Sulaco ship. When your team arrives, you find there has been a massive alien infestation and begin fighting for your life. Aliens: Colonial Marines was developed by Gearbox Software and published by SEGA.

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Thus far Aliens: Colonial Marines has received almost nothing but negative reviews. Metacritic has given the game a 42/100 with a user score of 3.5, and GameRankings has given the game a 37.33%. Most of the criticisms of the game are plainly evident after a few minutes of gameplay. The AI is very unintelligent and slow paced. You also have to look down at the ground and hover the cursor over items to pick those up…every single time.

The major criticism of Aliens: Colonial Marines focuses on how poor the graphics turned out. Gearbox and SEGA released a demo that showing off what looked to be an impressive game. Unfortunately the final product was a step backwards compared to the demo's graphics. It runs the Unreal 3 engine, with an upgraded renderer, meaning it is a DX9 game using DX9 graphics. The previous Aliens game, Aliens vs. Predators, released 3 years ago back in February 2010 used DX11. Not exactly progressing forwards with the engine decision and likely a huge and devastating case of console-itis.

Graphics Settings

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To our disappointment there were only three graphics options available in Aliens: Colonial Marines. Each of these options had a slider to adjust the quality of each option. None of the graphics options had any large impact on performance. Since each of the options have sliders, users are given some customization if they wanted to try to get a little better performance.

FXAA : This is the only option available to reducing aliasing in Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game did not support traditional MSAA. This option could be enabled or disabled.

Texture Detail : This setting determines the quality and detail on all textures in game. This mainly effects the objects It did not have a very large impact on performance, we recommend leaving it enabled at the highest level.

World Detail : This setting determines the quality and detail of the world. Basically, the areas of the game that are being rendered that we are not actually interacting with. It did not have a very large impact on performance, we recommend leaving it enabled at the highest level.

Shadow Detail : This setting determines the quality of all casted shadows in game. It did not have a very large impact on performance, we recommend leaving it enabled at the highest level.

Testing Aliens: Colonial Marines

To test Aliens: Colonial Marines we first played through the entire game. We looked for scenes, levels, or areas which produced lower framerates than others. Our run-through takes place on the seventh mission "One Bullet." This was one of the most demanding levels on our video cards. Being outdoors with several different light sources seemed to bring performance down. We begin our testing procedure after reaching the bottom of the elevator we are riding. We then proceed through a series of caves and tunnels, and around a fortified scientific building in hopes of saving Bella from the alien inside of her. The base has spotlights that we most avoid or these fire on us. Once we reach the hidden entrance to the base we stop our testing procedure. The entire run through takes between 5 and 6 minutes to complete. Our ideal framerate that delivers smooth and enjoyable gameplay in Aliens: Colonial Marines is 40 FPS.