Colonial Space Marine

Atten-hut!

The Marine class will be most familiar to veterans of first person shooters. You move the slowest out of the three, but you also carry the best guns and have the benefit of being able to pick up new weapons and health/armor kits in the levels. The Marine single player game is probably the one you're going to end up most frightened with, probably because us humans can relate best with the Marine, and out of all the three classes, it seems to be the one most fitting of the description "prey." Overall the Marine seems to be the most fragile of the three (the other two species don't take falling damage), but with full armor, you can sustain a decent amount of damage.

The only good alien is...

Let's see that in a better light

Tick, tick, tick...

Colonial Space Marines have only two vision modes. The first one is a normal mode supplemented by the motion tracker, a device taken from the Aliens movie. The device works very well and tracks any object that's moving in a 180 degree arc out in front of you. It works like sonar, giving off a pulse every second or so with an audible tick. That tick adds much to the tense, scary atmosphere, and I was pleased with the way the motion tracker was implemented. The second vision mode is a low light night vision mode. Unlike a lot of other "low light" modes in other games, this night vision mode is really based on ambient light. Looking at lamps with it can blind you, partially as will explosions or even the muzzle flash from your weapon. Also you're not allowed to use your motion tracker while in this mode, so as a marine you'll find yourself switching back and forth a lot, and using your flares to enhance your normal vision mode.

Remember this alien ship?

Night vision + flares = bad

Bring out the big guns

The Marine's weapons are very powerful, and they're all reminiscent of the Aliens and Predator movie. The standard weapon is the Pulse rifle, an extremely high speed machine gun. It carries 100 bullets per clip, and the secondary fire mode is a mini grenade launcher. The next weapon is the Smart Gun, which is also a machine gun type weapon. This one can lock on to targets and aim for you automatically though! The flamethrower is a powerful, but short range weapon. Anything caught on fire will take damage until the fire goes out (running around fast can speed this up). The full grenade launcher shoots 3 types of grenades, explosive, fragmentation, and mine type. The SADAR is an ass kicking, one shot rocket launcher, and finally, the minigun from Predator makes an appearance. This bad boy packs tons of punch, but you have to stand still or it won't fire very accurately.

My little friend Kevin here

Flares are good for the dark