"Good Singleplayer Experience, Multiplayer Disappointment"

Let me start by saying that the Alien and Predator movies are practically a prerequisite for enjoying this game to its fullest. If you haven't done so already, do yourself a favor and watch Alien, Aliens, and Predator at the very least. Some of the other movies are so-so, or not good, but if you watch those, you'll get a lot of the references and appreciate the sounds and story of the game more than you would otherwise.

Alright, I'm going to try to keep things categorized, so let me just start with graphics. You're actually reading reviews on games which means you don't just buy things because they're shiny. You more likely have an appreciation for gameplay and story rather than gaming for the sole purpose of bragging that it looks good to your friends. So to keep this short and sweet, the graphics are great. I can't exactly compare them, but let's just say faces, gore, and the xenomorphs (aliens) look excellent. The end. One thing to note about the gore, however, is that if you're squeamish or are concerned about parents or children seeing you play this, you might not want to get this game. It's insanely violent. Not if you like a good dose of excessive, raunchy violence, then game on. ;)

Next up: sound and music.

The action-oriented music is all essentially based on music from Aliens and Predator. The in-between-action music is based on music from Alien (think the scenes where they're going through the crashed alien ship in Alien and that's what the music is like). The music ain't great, but it's not a deal-breaker or anything. It does what it needs to and never bothered me. It's just nothing special. The sounds are all from the movies, which is fantastic, and the voice acting is very good. They have Lance Henrikson in the cast as well, which is always a treat. The various screams and shouts of marines are quite good, and you will certainly hear a lot of them, given the number of them that encounter gruesome deaths along your journey.

The controls can be re-mapped and are separate for each of the three races you can play as: Human, Alien, and Predator, so the controls are good since you get to choose them yourself. This is practically demanded in this era of gaming, and rightfully so.

The story isn't anything incredible. To be honest, I much preferred Aliens Vs. Predator 2's story, which was a game that came out some years ago. I liked that game far, far better than this game, over all, but this game improved some things. Unfortunately, the story just isn't one of those things that was bettered by this title. As a colonial marine (human), you get split up from the rest of the dead men walking and have to get from A to B while being given instructions/orders from two characters. The obvious stuff ensues: Weyland Yutani is evil, a predator tries to kill you, people get facehugged and/or slain by xenomorphs and predators, and there's a huge explosion. To be fair, this is what we expect, and it can be done well, but I just had a tough time caring or enjoying the story itself. It's just kinda there. The only good plot devices in the human campaign are a bunch of hidden tape recorder journal entries. They're pretty good, but good luck finding them. They're intentionally hidden and it's annoying when you miss them.

The predator story is even less spectacular. You go on the hunt to find a lost huntin' buddy. Humans try to kill you. Aliens try to kill you. You're ordered by some important predator to vaporize their technology when humans try to acquire it and kill everything in your way. Meh.

The alien storyline is poor overall, but starts good. You're an alien raised in captivity and branded with a 6 (Specimen 6). You are secured with restraints and get let loose to kill Weyland Yutani employees as an experiment. Your queen throws a hissy fit (pun intended) and you break out and then jack up all of the humans' gear (like communications, electric fences, etc.) to free your queen and make life suck in general for the colony. I suppose that considering no one can really talk in your species and you just kill stuff, this was actually a pretty good plot, taking that into account. Also, the "domestication" of the drone you control kind of explains how the drone you play as is able to figure so much out and disable so many defenses and whatnot.

Singleplayer gameplay! Like I mentioned, there are three campaigns, and what's actually cool (if you didn't know already) is that you can play as the three species in the game: human, xenomorph, or predator. I'll start with the human.

You're a marine, and you'll be getting about six weapons: pistol, pulse rifle, flamethrower, sniper rifle, shotgun, and smartgun. The pistol is pretty good and has a burst alt-fire that's less accurate but can do alright damage. It has infinite ammo and you always have it, so yay pistol. The pulse rifle is good, but the grenades it fires are too far and few between, and since aliens are so fast, you can rarely hit one with the 'nades. Given that the pistol can hit enemies at a distance just as well as the pulse rifle, and the fact you can only carry two weapons besides the pistol, make carrying the pulse rifle a difficult choice to side with. The flamethrower is okay in that is makes the aliens bug out (pun) and run all over the place before dying. One click of the mouse is enough to kill an enemy, typically, but the weapon is too situational and its lack of range makes the shotgun a better close quarters choice. The shotgun's just good. The sniper rifle lets you zoom, does high damage, and shows you the outline of enemies, cloaked or not, even if they're behind a wall. This gun is just plain win. When you get one, keep it. Every ammo pick up is for a lot and it's just so so good. The smartgun is awesome as it tracks enemies, and automatically hits them, but the problem is that you have to drop all weapons except the pistol to carry it, you can't run, it's extremely rare and late game, and the reload speed is awful. It's one of the two coolest guns, but has so many flaws that it's useless.

As the marine, you're going to be playing like most first person shooters, with the exception that your enemies can crawl on the walls and are extremely fast. What's really weird in this game, however, is this odd melee combat system they've implemented. You see, when a xenomorph swipes at you, you'll have to hold a button to block with your assault rifle. This isn't optional. You can't just kill all of them from afar as there are too many and they're too fast. You'll block the attack, then briefly tap that same block button, which will bash the alien, knocking it on the ground for you to shoot to death. While this works well and does add some variety, it seems very wrong for a rookie marine to be able to bash aliens in the face constantly, and even stranger yet, for him to be able to block their attacks consistently despite the species' speed. The only exception to this is heavy attacks, which you'll need to bash the xenomorph when you see it winding up for the strike. Canonically, this seems bizarre, but it works alright. I just would've preferred to do more shooting and less gun-bashing as a marine. I would often have about 2-3 aliens running circles around my character while I held block and waited for the moment to counter-attack. It was rather silly.

Other things worthy of mention are your flashlight, flares, and motion tracker. The flashlight, as usual, lights up a small area of space on the screen, and not very well. Flares provide a bit more light, and on the bright side (pun) they're infinite. However, you can throw one every five seconds or so, and they typically only last about that long as well, making them often quite useless. I couldn't really find a good purpose for them in the game. The motion tracker is great. It displays little dots in the bottom left corner of your screen in a 180 degree arc in front of your character, beeping whenever an enemy moves while in its range, and displaying the distance between you and said enemy. It's useful, it's from Aliens, the movie, and it's awesome. 'Nuff said about that.

The predator campaign, though lacking story-wise, is pretty fun. You can turn invisible, use thermal and xeno vision to see your enemies, trick enemies into going exactly where you want them to, perform precision distance jumps and attacks (leap attacks on enemies below/in front of you), and can slash the crud out of humans and xenomorphs alike. The blocking system works for the predator, both in terms of gameplay and story, as he's tough enough to legitimately fight claw to claw with the xenomorphs. You can really slice and dice those critters.

As you go through the game, you'll get four weapons in addition to the wrist blades. First is the plasma caster, a shoulder energy cannon that can lock onto enemies and blow them up. However, it takes a lot of energy to use. Unlike in Aliens Vs. Predator 2, you cannot recharge your energy willy nilly. You must find an energy source. They're marked when you hold the "focus" (run) button and stand still, and there are usually enough for you to kill a few enemies with energy-based weaponry. With the predator, you'll do a mixture of sneaking in plain sight (since you're invisible), distracting enemies, stealth kills, and weaponry kills. It's sort of a middle ground between the human and the xenomorph, but unique in its own way, too. You'll also acquire some proximity mines, which require energy to use, though those are self-explanatory. The predator disc is in the game, and it doesn't require energy, but is really only good at knocking down/damaging xenomorphs and knocking down marines. Still, it's worth using often, but is a very weakened version of the old disc, and it does not auto-target your enemies, but you can guide it around with the mouse as it ricochets off walls. Lastly is the combistick. Basically it's an alien spear. What's really weird is that this weapon is insanely powerful. One plus, however, is that once you have it, there's a new enemy type you need it for that has higher detection senses, health, etc. than marines, so it makes it a little more fair. The good thing about the predator campaign is that it has the most variety in enemy types. As a human, you'll fight xenomorphs almost exclusively, and as a xenomorph, you'll fight humans almost exclusively. However, as a predator, humans and xenomorphs are both out to get you (and vice versa), leaving what's around the next bin to be a bit of a surprise. As with the human, there are collectibles in the campaign, consisting of trophies. Luckily, you can see them in focus mode, making the achievement for finding them all a challenge rather than torture.

Finally, the alien campaign. I have to say, I was truly impressed with the alien in this game. At first, I was put off because the "Pounce" in Aliens Vs. Predator 2 was gone. You can pounce in this game, but only straight down or at a short distance, rather than drastically far or high like in AvP2. Also, combat is less about running up at enemies quickly and slashing them and more about being sneaky and brutal. You'll actually be hiding in the darkness, and your reticule will show you if you're lit up or in shadows. Typically, you can tell if it will count as light or dark, and can plan accordingly, Armed enemies have a red aura, while unarmed have a green aura. You can "harvest" these unarmed enemies, meaning hold them down and let a facehugger have at them. There's even an achievement for doing this. As for dealing with marines, you can sneak up behind them quickly and use stealth kills, grab them while hanging over them, drop down behind them and grab them...the list goes on. None of the other games have let you play a xenomorph like this. I'm not going to say it's "excellent," but it's the best xenomorph gameplay to date, and my favorite of the campaigns in this title.

MULTIPLAYER: That's enough about the singleplayer. Now let's talk a little bit about multiplayer. I'm going to be brief. I could talk about it for a long time, but I've prattled on about the singleplayer already. Long story short, multiplayer is a drag in this game. Or more like it was a drag. I pre-ordered the game and tried it when it first came out. Unfortunately, the match-making services had problems, it was impossible to find a game with a large number of players (just medium-sized, maybe 10 at best, usually, sometimes maybe 12). Gameplay-wise, flamethrowers were useless, predators could dominate the map due to the small game size and the pred team haivng the same number of players as humans and aliens...or worse, no aliens and 4 preds with 4 humans. Also, for some reason, they got rid of the excellent "class" system of AvP2. In AvP2, for instance, you could be a Light Predator using a speargun and a netgun, with lower health and moving faster, or a heavy pred that had more health, moved slower, and had a different weapon loadout than the light pred. There were several predators, several marines, several "Corporates" (mercs), and several aliens (like runner, drone, praetorian, predalien). These made the game fun and interesting, allowed for a multitude of strategies, and kept things interesting. In this game, you spawn and have to go find your weapons. For instance, marines start with a pulse rifle with no grenades, and a pistol. Preds also start with a slim arsenal, and you have to go look for guns like you're playing Quake III Arena or something. That may work in some games, but it detracts from the fun that had already been established in earlier AvP titles. Aliens don't need weapons, so they start at perfection, leaving people who don't know the maps at their mercy. As I mentioned before, there are a whole mess of other problems with the multiplayer, but to keep it short and sweet, multiplayer on AvP isn't "dead" but it's very lonely. A $5.00 sale just ended on this game last week, and the online is already abandoned. I logged on earlier today (Sunday, United States, around 4pm central) and had to wait five minutes for the game to find any match for me to join. The best it could do after five minutes was a game with myself and two other people in it, one of whom happened to be AFK. Very few people can be found online, and even if you're fortunate enough to find a populated game, it has a fair number of flaws that make AvP2 the better choice if you must play an alien/predator game online. There are far too many games I could be playing online instead of this one for me to merit playing it any longer online.

CONCLUSION: That said, this is a good game. If multiplayer is everything, don't buy or even bother with it. However, if you really like singleplayer campaigns, this game is definitely worth playing. I'd certainly recommend buying it if you're not hurting for cash or having to pick and choose which title(s) you pick up. I had a lot of fun with it and while it has a lot of problems, it's very good at certain things. Thanks for reading and I hope this helped.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/11/11

Game Release: Aliens vs. Predator (US, 02/16/10)