After a long, long time with no status updates, publisher Sega has now "re-announced" Aliens: Colonial Marines. The first person shooter based on director James Cameron"s classic 1986 feature film is still being developed by Gearbox Software (Duke Nukem Forever, Borderlands) and is now set for a spring 2012 release for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms. The game will be shown for the first time in public at E3 2011 next week.
Aliens: Colonial Marines has had a long and fairly quiet development history, for the most part. The game was first revealed way back in December 2006 but aside from a cover story in Game Informer magazine in February 2008 there have been no previews of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Gearbox Software has said the game was still in development but have remained mum on why it was taking so long to complete. Today"s press "re-announcement" gives no clues about the lengthy development time for the game.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is a direct sequel to the story events of Cameron"s Aliens film (and seems to bypass the events of the next movie, Alien 3). The storyline has a squad of Colonial Marines traveling to the planet LV-426 and to the now abandoned ship USS Sulaco, still in orbit around the planet. Fans of Aliens might guess as to what happens next to this Marine squad. You can check out a teaser trailer for Aliens Colonial Marines, which uses the Unreal Engine, below. Meanwhile Gearbox Software is about to release Duke Nukem Forever on June 14 in the US