Aliens: Colonial Marines trailer shows Smartgun carnage, macho marines, polite conversation

This latest look at Aliens: Colonial Marines answers an important question. What are the marines seeing when they look through the Smartgun's heads up display? Were they playing a bit of Tetris to take their minds off the hordes of charging aliens? Sadly not. They were actually watching a readout dishing out XP for every alien kill. Double kill! Triple kill! Godlike!

That explains their gung-ho attitude. Maybe it was all a game to them, right up to the moment where a Xenomorph got too close and they met a horrifying end. Hear Gearbox devs chatting about the Smartgun and more in the latest developer diary, which contains a few tantalising, wafer-thin slices of in-game footage amid all the well-mannered talking heads.

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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.