As of this writing, I have 9 achievements and 30 Challenges left in Colonial Marines. I've completed all of one category of the latter and I'm 7 away from finishing up a second. The strange thing about this game is the walls you encounter. I beat my head against Sentry Duty for so long, and then this morning I got the remaining 4 turret kills I needed to complete it in the span of about 20 minutes.
I've beaten the game once and now I sort of have a proper idea of what to expect on harder difficulties. I've beaten Stage 2 on Hardened and Ultimate Badass difficulties. Honestly? I'll probably beat the final stage, 11, next. Because you can replay missions whenever, you can cherry pick the order you want to tackle them in. It's nice, because if I run into a lot of trouble on one, I can bail and go back to it later. The final stage is simply a non-fight against a Queen Xenomorph. You move back and forth in the 'safe' area of a cargo bay, luring the queen into one area of the ship so you can run out in the open and flip four levers. Then you hit a button and the game is over. It's pretty lame for a final encounter, but I guess a limp finish is all I can expect out of this game.
I've almost hit another wall, however, and it's with two specific Challenges, one from each category. Stand Your Ground I believe I've brought up before - that's for getting the killing blow with a Service Pistol on a Crusher. The other is Hawked It All Up, for killing 2 Marines at once with a fully charged Acid Spit. Those will probably take awhile.
There are five remaining, including the two above, out of the 30 I need to mop up that I know are going to give me trouble. The rest are simple 'kill X using Y' type things, and those are simple, if a little time consuming.
I'm making a lot of posts about this game, both because I made this blog to chronicle the ups and downs of achievement hunting, but also just to have a place to talk about the games I play on the whole. Colonial Marines is kind of a tragic game, because every so often you see this glimmer of excellence in the rest of the garbage. I love the Alien franchise, and seeing it get manhandled like this is a pretty big bummer. But there are so many tiny little things I keep seeing that make me go 'Man, if only...'
The first encounter with the aforementioned Queen is an incredible sequence. Completely scripted and you're in no danger, but it sets her up to be this absolute monster. And she should be. While I don't care for how they handled the actual encounter with her, I think it might be better than actually killing her with your arsenal of weapons. She's a Queen, she shouldn't be brought down with common guns. Personally, I think it would've been cool to blow her head off with one of those AA Guns you destroy in the second to last mission, but that's just my opinion.
I wish Smart Guns were a normal weapon. They're so much fun to use and such an iconic part of the series that limiting them to one-offs seems like a waste. You can argue that they're overpowered, but there are ways to balance them. Make your movement or turning speeds slower, for example. If an alien sneaks up on you, they should be able to do a lot of damage. As it is, you can just whip around and open fire. You'd have to choose between mobility and auto-targeting.
Some of the flattest voice acting I've ever heard has come out of this game. I've mentioned Michael Biehn sounding bored out of his mind. Lance Henrickson's in it and, outside of a brief moment during the ending, he sounds like he just wanted some pizza money, too. I recognized a couple other voice actors in the mix, and it's not much better for them. I think Ashly Burch is probably the best of the lot, to be perfectly honest. That might be more that her character, Reid, is a strong female that both survives to the end and isn't saddled with a love interest of some kind. It helped that she also had some of the best lines in the game. The sick dance moves bit comes to mind.
And trust me, after suffering through so much Tiny Tina when perfecting the whole of Borderlands 2, I never thought I'd say Ashly Burch is my favorite anything, but here we are. To be fair, she's also one of the few VAs in Colonial Marines that bothered emoting in any way, and it definitely helped. As much as I didn't like O'Neal as a character, his VA - Travis Willingham - was actually putting forth a good performance. Also, I had to look his name up because I didn't know it offhand. Dude is Guile. Now, when I'm going through the remainder of the Challenges and achievements, every time O'Neal finishes a line, I'm going to mentally add 'Sonic Boom.'
I don't have any DLC for this game, but they brought back Al Matthews to reprise his role of Apone. He's a multiplayer character you can select, apparently. I went off to Youtube to look up the voice clips for that pack of DLC characters. Apone is probably my favorite character across the entire franchise. Yo, Apone got old. No surprise, I believe Mr. Matthews is now in his early 70s! Despite this, he still brought forth more gusto than most of the main cast in the Campaign. I think the only person from Aliens who didn't reprise a role was Bill Paxton. The sound-alike got the whiny edge to Hudson's voice, though. Also better than most of the main cast.
Having 30 Challenges and 9 achievements did a lot for my morale. 30 is a nice, round number and breaking into single digits for achievements is always nice. For the first time, it feels like I'll be able to pull this off.
And then I'll get to play Ultra Street Fighter 4, where every time Guile speaks, I'm just gonna hear "BELLA!"
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