Aliens vs. Predator – Crush! Frag! Review!

Aliens vs. Predator. If you are like me, then the utterance of these three words causes two very distinct emotional responses: joy and pain. On one hand, there are the excellent comics, books, and PC games which fused the two (mostly) unrelated franchises into a cohesive work. Then of course, you have the two AvP films, which opted to deftly remove the finer elements of both series in order to create generic action movies. When it comes to this AvP, there is certainly no fault placed on anyone exercising caution, wondering whether the game would fall in line with those before it or if it would take “liberties” (to put it kindly) with the franchise, as the films have.

Fortunately for us, Aliens vs. Predator seems to have borrowed sparingly from the recent films and only to construct the outlines of its story. Each species’ campaign opens with a cutscene depicting humans surveying a Predator temple on some remote planet. Here, a batch of Aliens (used as training dummies by the Predators) is found, as well as some ancient Predator technology. While the human scientists study both, a small band of Predators travels to the planet in order to protect their secrets. It isn’t long before the Aliens escape human captivity, resulting in the deployment of the Colonial Marines to the planet as well. From here, each very different campaign begins.

With dark corridors, the lowly hum and beep of the motion detector to keep him company and the constant threat of two races born to rip humans to pieces, “Rookie” – as he is known to his comrades – has by far the scariest and most fun-to-play campaign. The gameplay is standard shooter fare, bringing very little innovation to the table. You’ll move from area to area completing very simple objectives. Pull a switch here, rescue a comrade there, all the while obediently following the little marker on your HUD pointing you where to go.  However, it’s the setting and the atmosphere that make playing as the Marine so fun. From the sound of the Pulse Rifle to the threat of acid blood, every element of the Marine campaign feels true to Aliens. One thing I have to bring up though is the cumbersome method of listening to audio logs that can be collected throughout each level. Instead of just automatically playing when picked up, the player is forced to pause the game and select the newly found log from a menu. Worse yet, if you try to continue playing while the log rolls, it will automatically cut-off if any NPC speaks, forcing you back to the menu to play it again. It might be worth the trouble if the logs were overly interesting, but as they tend to be somewhat meaningless, I stopped even playing them by the end of the game.

The Alien is a lot of fun, if nauseatingly so. With quasi-fish eye lens in effect, the Alien darts about with great speed and purpose. Holding down the right trigger allows the creature to run straight up any wall or surface in its path. It’s easy to get lost sometimes doing so, as the camera swings to reorient itself to what is now the “floor” but you’ll get the hang of it with time. The Alien campaign mostly has the player hunting down humans, meaning it’s all about hiding in the dark and waiting to strike. You can press a button to let out a long hiss, typically drawing the nearest Marine toward your general location. From here, you can attack or sneak up on your opponent to deliver a gruesomely satisfying stealth kill. From ripping heads off to driving your tail all the way through the chest of your victim, these kills (though the animations do repeat) never get old.

The Predator campaign attempts to combine elements from both of the aforementioned campaigns with only mild success. Stalking human prey while cloaked is a lot of fun. You can take enemies out from a distance with the Plasma Caster as well as other ranged weapons or, much like the Alien, you can lure Marines away from their squad mates with the distraction ability before performing a stealth kill. This all works well, but its the Aliens that provide the most annoying moments during the Predator’s campaign. Usually outnumbered, the player is forced to engage in clunky hand to hand combat with these foes. In theory, the controls for light attacks, heavy attacks, and blocking are simple enough, but when in practice, it becomes futile trying to read your opponents in order to know which move to pull, thanks in a large part to the lack of light in most of the levels. Granted, as the campaign progresses, the Predator acquires weapons to help combat the Aliens as well as a special vision mode that highlights them much like the well known thermal vision mode from the original movies, but don’t be surprised if you give up before you reach that point.

The three campaigns tie together nicely, and by time you are finished with all of them, you will have an understanding of the timeline of events throughout the story, as well as how the actions in one campaign affected another, which was rather enjoyable. Combined, it’ll take about 8-10 hours to complete the game, but this number will be cut drastically if you happen to not like one of the campaigns and choose not to play it. I’m looking at you, Predator campaign.

Thankfully, the multiplayer suite, while not bursting with content, is rather fun. Death Match is of course present, as well as two variations, Species Death Match and Mixed Species Death Match. SDM has each species teamed up, working against the other two, while MSDM allows for two teams made up of any combination of the three races. Then there is Domination, a standard capture the point style variant. Infestation, one of the more interesting modes, picks one player to be an Alien and makes the rest Marines. The Alien is to kill the Marines off before the time runs out, the catch being that once killed, the Marine will respawn as an Alien. This one can be a lot of fun. Then there’s Predator hunt, which is sort of the opposite. Here, one player is selected to be the Predator, and the rest are Marines. The Predator is to hunt the humans and, if killed, will become a Marine while the player who killed him takes over as Predator. Lastly, there is a Survivor mode, in which 1-4 Marines simply try to stay alive against wave after wave of Aliens.

As you play online, experience is gained, though it only unlocks alternate skins for each race. Unfortunately, it seems there aren’t many people playing AvP, as I had a hard time finding matches in each game type for the review. Hopefully the number of people playing improves over the next few weeks, as the multiplayer is a lot of fun, even when held against some of the more renowned shooters of today. That’s quite a feat.

I started the second sentence of this review with “if you are like me” and I reiterate that if, like myself, you have a fond place in your heart for the Alien and Predator films or the AvP comics or games, I believe you will enjoy this game. Its campaigns and mechanics don’t really stray from the norm, but it is the attention to detail and setting that make this game worth playing. Yet, its greatest strength is at once its greatest weakness; if you have no appreciation for the original films, I doubt you will find much at all to enjoy in Aliens vs. Predator.

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Things We Liked: Great sense of atmosphere. Excellent use of sound. Fun, if simple, Marine and Alien campaigns. Addictive multiplayer modes, especially Infection. Stays just far away enough from the AvP films.

Things We Disliked: Frustrating Predator campaign and melee combat. Short individual campaigns. Odd menu decisions. Lack of people playing online.

Target Audience: Really, just anyone who enjoys the films of old. If you know little about either franchise, this game isn’t going to win you over.

(Aliens vs. Predator – Developer: Rebellion Developments. Publisher: Sega. Available on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 – PlayStation 3 version reviewed. A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher. New to CFD!’s reviews? Read our explanation here.)

Tags: Aliens vs. Predator PC PS3 Rebellion review Sega Xbox 360