Video games in the Alien franchise are hit or miss, to put it lightly. For every Alien: Isolation, there are a few already-dead facehuggers, like the disastrous Aliens: Colonial Marines. Although the 2013 FPS lives in infamy, voice actor Ashly Burch has fonder memories.
Well-known as the performer behind Tiny Tina in Borderlands and Aloy in the Horizon series, Burch was just starting to break in when Colonial Marines arrived, and she reveals that her time on Pandora actually got her through the door. "I was just really excited that I’d gotten another gig," she remembers in an interview with Fall Damage.
"The reason that I got Alien: Colonial Marines is because it's a Gearbox title," she recalls. "I had done well enough with Tiny Tina that they were like, 'Oh, let's bring her into this thing.'" She voices Lieutenant Lisa Reid, one of the marines sent to investigate the USS Sulaco after the events of Aliens, only to wind up back in the Hadley's Hope colony on LV-426.
A side-character, Lisa manages to survive the entire plot of Colonial Marines, but Burch has been pretty alright with people forgetting she was involved. "When a game doesn’t do well, sometimes it's tied to performance, but often, people are thinking about gameplay and narrative more than anything else," she muses.
"So I think I kind of felt like, 'Are people even going to remember that I was in this?'" she says, before adding with laughter: "Now they do."
The issues with Colonial Marines are plentiful, but the voice-work isn't one of them. Maybe we'll hear Burch back as Lisa in Alien: Isolation 2 or another release someday, though finding the time in her schedule will be a little harder now than it was back then.
