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E3 2011: Eyes on with Aliens Colonial Marines

Gearbox Software is a very busy game developer at E3 2011. 2K Games is showing off Duke Nukem Forever at their booth and the lines to see that game are long, even though the game is due for release in Europe on Friday and in the US on Tuesday. Ubisoft just announced the co-op themed shooter Brothers In Arms Furious 3 this week. Now Sega has finally brought the long-in-development movie-based shooter Aliens Colonial Marines to demo for the crowds at E3 2011.

The hands-off but live game demo takes the premise that the events in Alien 3, well, didn't happen. Gearbox says they appreciate Alien 3 but wanted to make what they see is a true sequel to James Cameron's 1986 film. That means another ship is now heading to LV-426 to find out what happened to the Sulaco and its crew, including "observer" Ellen Ripley. This new set of marines find out how nasty the alien threat is when they explore LV-425 and encounter H.R. Giger's creations.

There's a lot to like about this game already if you are a fan of Cameron's film. All of the action is there as the marines have to face off against the aliens who can crawl on seemingly any surface and thus making them much more difficult to kill. There's the motion tracker to "see" how much trouble you are in. There's the auto-turret that was in the Director's Cut version of the movie as well as the Power Loader that Ellen Ripley used in the final part of the film. Most importantly the game looks like it will be fun to play with full four player co-op available. There's even a new alien to deal with; a larger creature with a bigger head that can be used for charging foes.

The demo was fairly brief so we hope that there's some interesting surprises in store for the rest of the game. Our fear is that this will simply be a remake of Aliens with new characters instead of continuing the Aliens storyline. However we are hopeful that Gearbox knows what they are doing and will make this game worth our time when it comes out in 2012.

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