Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction

"Aliens and Predators and Marines...Oh My..."

Strategy games are far and away the hardest games to get into without a little flare and a little glitz to really get them going. Featuring units upon units, real-time action and plenty of violence, Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction tries hard to give you the feel of all out war, but loses a little to lack of options and tough to see visuals. While all the makings of a great game are here with tough missions, mindless destruction and the use of ruthless, stealthy Predators, vicious Aliens and battle hardened Marines, the lack of units that are available might make some strategy purists cringe at the base play found. Others might find that the swarms of enemies that come running at them and lack of overall strategies aside from overrunning the enemy with your own units isn’t enough to keep interest for more than an hour at best.

The story of Extinction actually falls back into the graphic novels and various texts in which the Marines are fighting the Aliens on all fronts of the human territories, but come to find out that the Predators are behind the recent Alien resurgence on occupied worlds. With the human race now under threat, the Marines must fight both the vicious Aliens and the Predators in total war. On the same side of the coin, the Predators are looking to take trophies with both the Aliens and the Marines, using both stealth and weaponry as part of their plan, also taking on the rogue bands of Predators looking to make profit rather than honor. The Aliens on the other hand, look to colonize wherever they can, protecting the queen and furthering their own existence no matter who they overrun.

Playing the game allows you to use one of three different races with each having their own strengths and weaknesses according to which race you decide to play. The Marines have plenty of fire power and are fairly quick, but their overall numbers are determined by the amount of money that small evaporators can make on each of the battlefields. You’ll have your standard infantry, which fire powerful rounds and can overwhelm smaller groups of enemies into smart-gunners that can tear apart larger, stronger units. Medics are present to heal your injured units, while replica units can detect Predators that are under stealth and defeat larger Aliens by outlasting them with extended health. However, you need sufficient numbers of them all in order to actually defeat any of the scenarios after the first one, so be ready for some serious fighting.

The Aliens on the other hand work differently and require actual strategy to play in order to be successful. The only way to get units and create stronger, faster Aliens is to actually drag victims back towards a base and have them implanted by the Egg Sacks of movie fame. From there, you can create more drones that simply drag back the victims for new Aliens, or you can create new, stronger soldier Aliens to overrun your opponents. In order to heal your Aliens on the other hand, you have to create giant webs which will heal any Alien units once they are on the web. It’s strange to actually get any of these scenarios started, because you literally have to kill something first and drag it back to the eggs, and then create your Queen before you can get started in the killing.

The Predators are by far the strongest of the choices that you have, and they attack in huge numbers depending on what you choose to have on your side. There are several different types of Predators, all of which are combat units, and they have two things that make them much stronger and more prone to winning that the other two sides do not have. The first of these is the fact that they can go invisible at anytime and strike from that position whenever they want to. Another portion of this is that they can heal on the fly with a simple selection of the button, which eliminates the need to have a medic unit or anything else that might be easily destroyed. When playing through the Predator scenarios, it is easy enough to get a big group of Predators and run through the stage just destroying anything. Something of interest here though is that money for more units is collected through pulling the skulls of your battle victims.

The overall mechanics of Extinction is simple for anyone with a little real-time strategy game experience and you’ll find that there is nothing exceptional here that you have to worry about. You simply select your units and have them perform an action which ranges from destroying a close target to tracking something down. In all reality, there isn’t much else here but a seek and destroy format, which anyone can get into. The only problems that I encountered here was with the menu system that you can assign your units orders to. Sometimes I went to give them order to kill, and they simply stood there, or the orders were queued up and they did the exact opposite. While not a big deal, there are critical points of the missions that can either cause success or defeat depending on what your units feel like doing.

The visual presentation is actually pretty good in the respect that the environments are stained with blood after a huge battle and the actual animations in the fighting are pretty well defined. You can pan a camera in or out depending and see what your units are doing while they are fighting or getting ready to do so, which is a plus if you’re looking for visual flare. The problem here though, is that the action gets so intense at some points, that if the camera is too close to the action, all you see is a giant mess of flying projectiles and blood, which blocks out the actual detail of the units. Each of the species on the other hand has plenty of detail and you can see the minute differences in them if you look closely enough from the way that they are dressed {Marines and Predators} to the way that that crawl across the screen {Aliens}.

Environments range from huge, dank caverns to large military bases that are teeming with life that is human or otherwise. There are times that the environment will stop you for a moment so that you can stare at it, such as the immense jungles that you sometimes have to travel through. The environment is not battle-scarred though by your fighting, which is a little disappointing at times considering some of the weapons that you use, but otherwise the raining blood is interesting to watch splatter the ground. There are no cut-scenes that are movies between the different missions, but they look as if they’ve been ripped right from one of the graphic novels, and the opening movie is actually pretty good at getting you pumped for the overall game.

The sounds of Extinction vary depending on the situation, but the music that you find is nearly non-existent when you get into the overall battles. What you will hear is the sounds of grenades and gunfire as well as the screams of Marines as they die and the roar of Predators when they rip a skull from a victim as a found trophy. The hiss of Aliens and the whine of machine guns are present, giving you a real sense of being there and even being in the Alien movies. However, all of the sound effects overshadow the music, which I’m certain is there, but is so un-memorable that you won’t remember what it was even if you heard it. One other thing that I found to be pretty interesting about the effects is that the story is told through narration on the different stages, which adds a little more ‘movie’ style feeling to the overall game.

Extinction isn’t a bad strategy game, but in the age of where units consist of full scale battles that number in the hundreds and not just handfuls, include more than machine guns in the form of tanks and otherwise, Extinction falls a little short. While not the most ingenious way to create a game, the only strategy that you find here is with the Aliens themselves and actually working hard to get the right result. If you’re interested enough in the whole Aliens-Predator story, then you’ll find that this game is just enough for you to play outside of a full out action game. However, if you want more bang for your buck, want to control the kick ass Marine tanks, and the Predator ships, then you need to wait and look for something else, because all that’s here is the basic ground fighting units.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/22/03