Review – Aliens vs. Predator

FPS/Survival Horror

Look into my eye, Rebellion.

It’s shit, you know.  Just saving you a little suspense which isn’t really in keeping with the source material of the game.  I mean those Alien films were dripping in tension and suspense.  Rebellion however have no understanding of such things at all.  Any fan of the movies could pen a more interesting story than this one and, if you’ve played the previous games, you won’t be getting any surprises here.

The thing about AvP games is that the source material gives you so much of a headstart as a developer.  Character design, environments, atmosphere and sound are already taken care of.  Anyone who says to you ‘yeah but AvP gets the atmosphere just right’ needs stabbingz because just throwing a xenomorph skin into Unreal Tournament and turning down the gamma would sort that out for you.

What we expect is that people take the source material and run with it.  Take it up a level.  Shower us with fan-service.  Throw in as many nods to the (good) films as possible, throw out any shit relating to the god-awful recent movies.  Show us stuff we haven’t seen in the films and comics.  Most importantly, though, don’t give us a game that clearly isn’t as good as the two PC games that were released roughly ten years ago.  Yes, definately don’t do that.

AvP doesn’t deliver.  At all.  You get the usual combination of three single-player campaigns and various adversarial modes, as well as the now-mandatory horde mode variant.  The story revolves around the not-very-convincingly-shoehorned-in character of Karl Bishop Weyland who, like anyone in any Aliens comic with money or influence, has decided to start experimenting on xenomorphs for profit and military supremacy.

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Oh sorry, I dozed off for a second there.

The marine campaign is where you go for your scares.  And by scares I mean welcome to 1996, here’s piss-poor torch and a thimble full of ammo, have at the alien hordes with that, Soldier.  After a brief bit of exposition (you get knocked out, your team gets eaten, you wake up alone in a traditional Weyland-Yutani colony building) you get put into the role of a rookie marine on a one-way ticket to ShitYoPantsVille.  This calm before the storm is arguably the best part of the whole game as the tension is almost unbearable and you won’t have experienced the mediocre gameplay yet.

After a while you’ll be plugging away at the extremely mobile xenos with little more than a piss-weak pistol while your ‘free with this week’s DIY Magazine pocket torch’ feebly attempts to show up the black aliens against the black walls of whatever fucking identical corridor or room you happen to be in.  You’d be better off using harsh language.

The marine campaign follows the Dead Space school of mission design by asking you to fix this, break that or flick that switch.  It’s awful.  No decent narrative, no fanboy pleasing nods to the movies, a motion tracker that feels like taking a Tom Tom to the north pole and some shitty boss battles.  Oh yeah, throw in some androids just to piss me off further.  I prefer the term artificial bellends though.

Next you’ve got the Alien campaign.  Remember the excellent beginning to the Alien campaign in AvP2 where you got to play through the alien lifecycle, starting as a facehugger?  Yeah?

Right, well forget it.  You start of as a captured Alien stuck in a lab somewhere.  After a bit of goading by Dr. Soon-to-have-my-motherfucking-inner-jaws-in-yo-motherfucking-skull, you escape and start getting your mission objectives from Her Royal Highness herself.

‘Break the radio transmitter’, she orders, bizarrely.  ‘I’ve got a hammer in my shed behind the gaffa tape’.   Thanks, Queeny.  Then it’s flip that switch, smash that computer.  She may as well start each order with ‘would you kindly?’ as you’re basically doing the same kind of shit that you did in Bioshock or indeed any FPS that lacks imagination.

Surely they could have done more here.  Give us some real insights into how the xenomorphs work.  Seriously, if you took away the wall-walking, you may as well be a human in this game and the Alien campaign is short, repetitive, uninspired, boring and a complete waste of your time.

The Predator gets the best campaign in the game as he sets out to clean up the chaos of this intergalactic three-way clusterfuck.  Starting out as a ‘youngblood’, your weapons and techniques are drip-fed to you throughout the story.  All the usual gadgets and vision modes are accounted for and reasonably easy to handle (Predator games are usually a thumb-mangling nightmare) and the Predator’s manoeuvrability makes him a joy to use.

Lurk Secondary Review Aliens vs. Predator is a game I was looking forward to, so much I even pre-ordered the Hunter Edition. I’m a sucker for anything with H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs in and as such I’m still moist in anticipation of Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines. So this game is just to tide me over until that is released. With three separate campaigns you’d think that this would have a meaty single player, unfortunately instead of a juicy T-bone you’re left with a McDonald’s cheeseburger. Not only are the campaigns short they’re wholly underwhelming. The marine campaign is a generic FPS using dark rooms and a torch that isn’t any use to try and set up any atmosphere. The Alien campaign isn’t any better, it consists of running about doing tasks for the queen. The awkward controls do not help you in trying to do them either. Finally the Predator campaign where you stalk and pick off the humans one by one. Or have have to fight off hordes of Aliens, apart from a couple of boss fights, it sorely lacks in variety. Multiplayer can be fun, but is ultimately bogged down by bad netcode and lack of host migration when it comes to deathmatches. Ultimately the game is lacking in depth and any kind of innovation, which is a shame when you consider how strong the source material is. Secondary Score: 6/10

As before though, the campaign is short and uninspiring and reveals little of what it means to be a Yautja.  There are glimpses though of how the planet you’re was used as a battle arena and ceremonial temple in the past which is nice and the little speeches from Karl Weyland, as you get closer to finding him, are interesting but overall it’s not even close to making this game essential.

Aside from the disappointing single-player content you’ve also got the usual rack of multiplayer modes.  However it’s a far from polished experience.  It’s not too laggy but it can take ages to get into a game and when you do the balance between the species is laughable with the xenomorphs basically handing the humans and predators their arses.  It can be mildly diverting but it won’t keep you away from Modern Warfare 2 for more than a week. Well done to Rebellion though for stubbornly sticking to the kind of spawn-point system that all other developers scrapped ten years ago though.

You also get your basic horde variant.  This pits you and up to three friends as marines against waves of aliens.  There are only two maps though – one of which is abysmal and the other which is a nice colony corridor.  The corridor one is quite nice and authentic but gets dull after a couple of waves.

On top of all of this, there are the achievements.  They are all there… ranked multiplayer achievements, near-impossible singleplayer achievements, horrible collectible achievements.  There’s nothing good here.  Yet again, Rebellion have pushed out a piss poor excuse for a game.  Low on ideas, polish and general TLC.

This game, for some reason, has its fans… mainly amongst the Alien fanboys (of which I’m one) but if you took the aliens and predators out of this game and just put in, I don’t know, robots and bears, the gameplay wouldn’t hold up at all.

The fact is, it’s been slim pickings for us alien fanboys for over a decade now so we shouldn’t be surprised and while the sub-standard graphics, weak set-pieces and uninspired writing do their level best to completely scupper the game, AvP does at the very least deliver an average FPS with some half-decent scares and stalking. Ultimately though, this is really as unimaginative a take on the AvP universe as you could ever make but then this game was always the runner-up prize and while I can tolerate them fucking up AvP, if they fuck up Colonial Marines, I’ll be stocking up on CN-20 and nerve-gassing the whole fucking development studio.

Rating: 4/10