“Wowie!” My friend says a few weeks ago. “You know what would be a great game to play online?”
“I don’t care” I say.
“A game that came out a year ago, and is made mainly for consoles!” He responds.
“I’ll only play it if you gift me it.” Thinking I out smarted him.
“Alright!” He says.
“Ugh.”
Aliens V.S. Predator is a game made by Rebellion Developments, who are known to gamers for their many AvP knock-off games. Outside of that, the only games I recognize is the “Gun” PSP port and “Rogue Warrior”, which is a horrible start. In AvP, there are three campaigns to play through. Each one has you playing a different species. Aliens, Predators, and Marines. The story is that the Marine Spaceship “Marlowe” has been shot down by an unknown species, and it’s fallen onto a planet where Humans are discovering ancient Predator ruins and running experimenting on the Xenomorph Aliens. Predators are angry that the Marines are gallivanting around on one of their hunting grounds, Aliens are angry because their Queen is being held captive on the Marlowe, and the Marines are just kind of milling about.
Now, I love Alien and all of their sequels, and I love Predator and.. well, its sequel was pretty bad, actually. The movie Aliens V.S. Predator did a Freddy V.S. Jason sort of thing where two otherwise good franchises cancel each other out when paired together. I didn’t care too much for AvP, and I wasn’t really looking forward to this game, as hinted by the discourse with my friend. The concept sounds great on paper! Different game play elements for each species. The sneaky Alien, waiting to pounce on its prey. The violent Predator, able to cloak, fight head on, and use ranged weapons. The Marine, ready to find the auto-target gun and piss off the Predators and Aliens.
Each campaign has the same major plot easily summed up with the question: “The Marlowe is down, what does this mean to me?”. For the Aliens, that means they’re going to try and rescue their Queen. For the Marines, it means he wants to go save his buddies. For the Predators, they just want to blow up the cadavers of their comrades killed by the falling plane, for some reason.
The Alien campaign starts off interesting enough (Which I won’t spoil because it is a unique way to start off a campaign), and then proceeds to fall flat on its face. It isn’t that bad but it gets stupidly hard. As an Alien, the biggest advantage you have is staying in the dark and creeping around, which barely works. All the NPC Marines seem to have infrared vision, because no matter where you are, they’re probably going to see you. I was sneaking around in a vent at one point, and I emerged out of it into the darkness of the ceiling. Just then, a Marine, on the total opposite side of this huge hangar, saw me out of the corner of his eye and proceeded to blast my ass and various other parts of my body off of me back into the vent I was still crawling out of. There were no lights around me! I was on the ceiling. He was on the other side of the room, on the ground. He didn’t have an auto-target gun or anything! I was doing everything right and he just used his telescopic vision to locate and kill me in a matter of seconds. There were too many moments like that to count.
The Marine campaign is Doom 3. That’s all I need to say. It’s Doom 3. The environment, the weapons. It’s Doom 3. They try their best to be creepy with all the darkness, and what’s around the corner stuff, but it isn’t scary. It’s Doom 3. Was Doom 3 scary? Of course not. It had those surprise scare moments, startling, sure, but that doesn’t make it scary. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is scary. This is just people going “BOO!” The Predator campaign has you running around killing Aliens and getting decimated at every point possible by Marines. I don’t know how these Marines are able to destroy all the other species. I could never do that against my friend online. He couldn’t either. You know how easy it was for Arnold and everyone else to spot the Predator in his movie? Of course not! It wasn’t easy, that’s the point. I have no idea why it’s so easy for everyone here! These guys can spot you out of nowhere. Even your little plasma gun thing runs out amazingly fast, so don’t count on that. Proximity mines? Ha! The whole campaign is just hard and really dumb.
But how is the multiplayer? I would like to know too! I waited for 20 minutes, searching for a game. You know what I came up with? One game. Two people in it. This isn’t a multiplayer experience, and I don’t think we’ll ever see one come out of this on the PC. It just feels like a console port, and I won’t be surprised if it is. I played with my friend and the game was horribly unbalanced. I was able to kill him so many times with the Predator no matter what class he was, and he did the same thing to me. Is this why nobody is playing multiplayer? It might just be. This game is just stupid. It has a fun concept, yes, but it fails on all levels. The NPCs are idiotically difficult, the auto-aim gun is way over powered for online play, and the online play isn’t even there anymore.
