[Jester]

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Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Isolation was generally well received as a good game, Colonial Marines was not. Average critic scores for Isolation on each current gen console at the time of release are about 80/100 while average scores for Colonial Marines top at 48/100.

I'd say that there's a great degree of confirmation bias at work there. On the one hand, I think a lot of people were really desperate to have a "good" Aliens game after all the negativity directed at Colonial Marines, and on the other, there's a fairly aggressive subset of the Aliens fandom that get their noses severely out of joint when their slobbery darlings are portrayed as anything less than nigh-on-unstoppable, which overlaps with another subset which prefers the first and third films to the second (Alien 3 being largely a by-the-numbers retread of Alien). Positive reviews for Isolation tend to focus on elements of the game that appeal to these demographics, such as "Strong Female Character," the centrality of some chick called "Riley" and the extremely limited availability of weapons and the fact that the xenomorphs are entirely unkillable by the player outside of scripted events. By contrast, Colonial Marines takes its cues directly from Aliens, which establishes that, for trained, heavily-armed soldiers, the threat isn't so much the xenos themselves as the interference and malicious intent of fellow humans. Since both games suffered from their fair share of bugs (and many of Isolation's, such as the Magic Inventory-Eating Elevators, actually worse than anything in Colonial Marines), it seems more likely that rather than being objectively better in any sense, Isolation simply appealed to a more vocal segment of the fan-base, which not coincidentally also happened to have an intense dislike for Colonial Marine's more measured, less "xenophilic" approach to the material.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Isolation was not fault-free but it's hard to forgive CM for its numerous bugs and more so its complete continuity errors, chiefly the fact that Hadley's Hope is somehow still standing after the ending of Aliens.

That's far less a suspension of disbelief than Isolation asking the player to accept that a major space station was built and was operating in the Zeta Reticuli system for decades before the loss of the Nostromo without anyone ever once deciding to check out that weird signal coming from LV-426, or the crew of the Nostromo never once thinking of heading for said station for help after Kane was attacked, or basically anything relating to anything Weyland-Yutani does throughout the entire game.

Quote:

Originally Posted by En Sabah Nerd

Those are all really minor details as opposed to the fact that this sculpt just doesn't look like a Spitter because it isn't overall smooth on top and doesn't have those side fin/axe things at the front of the head.

Those are really minor details.