Aliens: Colonial Marines, from SEGA, Gearbox and (mostly) TimeGate Studios is not a very good game. That’s about the highest praise I can give the title; a game that essentially insulted gamers and Aliens fans by being a last generation rushed-to-market mess. Now, on the PC at least, it’ll be getting a little better.

The game will be on the receiving end of a hefty 4GB patch; adding, among other things, a high-resolution texture pack and “various visual improvements.” In addition to that, a number of AI improvements have been made; bringing the game just a little closer to that impressive, unfortunately fake E3 demo footage

3/18/2013 Update General Improved texture resolution.

Various visual improvements.

Added mouse smoothing to options menu.

Fixed crashes tied to launch and motion tracker.

Added additional safeguards to better protect save data.

Resolved an issue where a player’s level could sometimes appear incorrect when backing out of a party.

Addressed several scenarios under which players could spawn without a weapon.

Changes to better prevent audio from sometimes cutting out during end of mission cinematics.

Fixed issue where Xeno death animation was not properly calculating momentum of the killing blow.

Smart Gun animation now properly tracks targets.

Addressed some instances where Xenos would display erratic animations.

Increased light radius for player’s shoulder lamp.

Adjusted aim assist to better reflect player input.

Addressed an issue that could sometimes cause co-op player revival to not work under certain circumstances.

Addressed issues with players not spawning into a level properly.

Fixed a marine player invincibility exploit.

Resolved several instances where players could walk or fall outside of maps.

Addressed an issue where Ripley’s Flamethrower (bonus content) would sometimes fire continuously without player input.

Fixed an issue that could cause localized text to sometimes display incorrectly.

Addressed an issue where weapon ammunition was not always highlighted properly.

General user interface improvements.

Miscellaneous bug fixes. Campaign Tweaked enemy and friendly AI to be more aggressive and responsive.

Modified campaign difficulty to account for improved AI responsiveness.

Improved enemy collision detection regarding doors and Power Loader.

Addressed some issues that could cause improper warping for co-op players.

Various tweaks to address instances where NPC characters would not always properly navigate to objectives.

Players will no longer bleed out immediately when downed in a Power Loader. Versus Fixed issues that could cause clients to report inaccurate results and statistics.

Addressed instances where a map would appear to “pop in” when loading into a new match.

New Xeno appearance customization added.

Multiplayer teams should now correctly auto-balance between rounds.

Increased duration of Lurker Pounce Challenge “Cat-Like Reflexes” from 10 to 20 seconds.

Fixed issue where certain multiplayer challenges would not unlock properly for all characters.

Crusher pick-ups now correctly appear as highlighted for clients.

And while it’s great that Gearbox (or whoever it is they’ve outsourced the patching to) is trying to fix this mess, unfortunately, no amount of patching can turn Colonial Marines in to a good game.

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