As you may know, I had some real issues with the AVP demo that came out two weeks ago. While the demo proved the game had a good premise and some great ideas, complex controls and the fact that it was impossible to get a game going left me a bit concerned for the final product. Well, I received the disc from Gamefly on Thursday, and have since then given most of the different game modes a whirl. Unfortunately, the demo gave a very accurate pretense on how the finished game would be…a game with great ideas, but executed badly.
First off, the story/background to the game is virtually non-existent. The game takes place shortly after the events of Alien 3, but I would not have known that had I not read it somewhere online. There is no background story at all, and the cut scenes, while looking and sounding good, do little to explain what the heck is going on. Im going to take a stab at it and say that humans find some ancient Alien/Predator temple and start creating mutant Aliens. The Marines and Predators come in to put a stop to it, resulting in a three-way battle royale to be the last species standing. There are three single player campaigns (Marine, Alien, Predator), and each three tell the same story through the respective species point of view. For example, as an Alien you are defending the hive from the invading factions, and as a Marine you are called in to clean up the mess. That being said, I’ll start this review up with the single player campaigns.
The first one I played through was the Aliens. The campaign starts off with you (an Alien) chained up in some research lab, and you must break out and go on a killing spree. The Alien’s gameplay style is that of stealth. The Alien must stick to the shadows, crawling on walls and ceilings in order to sneak up on unsuspecting prey. While this makes for a unique FPS experience, it can get frustrating quickly, as the camera tends to get confused on where you are, and can make for a spinning, sickening screen. The Alien has three main attacks: a light attack (claw), a heavy attack (tail), and a lunge attack. Also, if behind an opponent (or standing over a downed opponent), the Alien can perform their instant kill grapple move, which will result in a head being severed or a chest being pierced. Another weird thing about the Alien is that some of the humans are unarmed civilians, and instead of killing them you harvest them by opening their mouths so a facehugger can latch on. I say its weird because there seems to be no point to it. In the AVP game on the Jaguar I used to play, Aliens could harvest human players, but it was either for health or extra lives. The only thing is that you get a trophy for harvesting every civilian in the game, but otherwise there is no point to not killing them. The Alien can regenerate health by hiding and avoiding damage, which will result in the slow healing of the health bar. In the end, the quick, stealthy gameplay of the Alien proved to be the most fun.
The second campaign I played through was that of the Marine. You start off as a rookie Marine who’s squad crash lands on the planet, and you must fight for survival as you make your way to the temple. The Marine’s controls and gameplay are similar to any FPS you have ever played…you walk around, collect guns and ammo, and kill anything that moves. This is the most familiar mode, and I highly recommend playing through as a Marine first to get used to the game. One thing I didnt mention in the Aliens campaign is that every character has a blocking system. Holding L1 and R1 together will cause the Alien, Predator, or Marine to block incoming attacks. If a character attempts to hit with a light attack, blocking it will deflect it, allowing you to counter with an attack. This is probably one of the lamest features of the game. Imagine, an Alien is running at a Marine. The Marine throws his hands up, and the Alien’s claw gets deflected. As the Alien stumbles back, the Marine counters by pistol-whipping the Alien, causing it to fall to the floor. The Marine then opens fire, killing the xenomorph as it struggles to get up. This melee combat system is extremely lame, and makes online death matches extremely cheesy and lame (not to mention the single player campaigns very easy.) But enough of my rant on the flawed melee.
As I said, the Marine is your basic FPS gameplay. You start off with a pistol, but can pick up a pulse rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, smart gun (like a chain gun with auto-targeting) and flamethrower along the way. You can only carry three guns at a time, so you will constantly be switching off weapons as you run out of ammo. All weapons have a secondary fire which have different effects. For example, the pulse rifle can fire off a grenade, and the sniper rifle will zoom in. The Marine’s health system is similar to that of Resistance: Fall of Man. The health bar is made up of three sections. If you avoid damage for a certain amount of time, a damaged bar will refill on its own. However, if a bar completely loses all its health, it can refill automatically. Instead, you will need to use a stimpack, which can be picked up across levels and will refill all health. The Marine campaign was decent, but there was nothing really unique about it… it’s just your standard FPS.
The Predator campaign was the last one I played through. At first I didn’t enjoy it, but as I played more I got more into it. The Predator, like the Alien, requires the player to use stealth. However, unlike the Alien, the Predator is extremely slow. You definitely get the impression that you are hunting when playing as the Predator. Early in the game, the Predator relies heavily on melee combat. There are four different weapons the Predator can collect (shoulder cannon, throwing discs, mines, and a spear), but they only appear as the story moves along. The shoulder cannon uses energy, which can be replenished by hacking into Marine computer terminals throughout the level. The other weapons have unlimited ammo, making them useful in that respect. However, they are slow, so it is not smart to run into a room and expecting to have guns blazing like the Marines. Also, like the Aliens, the Predator can grapple enemies from behind for a one-hit kill.
The Predator has a similar health system to that of the Marine, in which they can obtain health packs throughout the level and use them when necessary. Like in the movies, the Predator has unique vision abilities, as well as the ability to turn practically invisible. The Predator’s vision is extremely helpful. You can use it to scan the entire map in front of you for key locations and items you can pick up. Also, by pressing the circle button you can alternate between normal vision, “thermal vision” (to make it easier to find Marines), and “Alien vision”, which allows you to hunt down Aliens easier. The invisibility action is performed with the push of a button, but I rarely saw it work. If I was stationary and invisible on a ledge, a Marine who walked into my field of view would usually spot me and attack. One cool thing that the Predator could do was that he could lure enemies out. After targeting an enemy, you can select a space in sight, and the Predator would say something mockingly (like in the movies) and the enemy would walk over to where you selected. This makes it easy to separate a pack of Marines for some easy kills. The Predator campaign starts off slow and difficult, but once you get the varying controls down and start picking up better weapons, it gets better.
Now lets move on to the online modes. AVP offers a variety of online games, but my favorite by far was the co-op survival mode. In survival mode, you and up to three buddies can join forces as a squad of Marines who must face off against ever-increasing waves of Aliens in a confined space. There are plenty of ammo and health pickups which respawn frequently, so you will rarely find yourself out of ammo. The survival maps tend to be very dark, making it an intense and frightening experience as you and your buddies constantly spin about looking for the closest xenomorph. This all sounds like its a blast, but there is one major flaw which really kills this mode in the end…there is no respawning. Once your Marine is down, he is down and out until the other Marines are dead. So once you die, you basically keep watching your teammates play until they eventually all die. It’s not a lot a fun at all. Now compare this survival mode to that of Uncharted 2. In Uncharted 2, once a player “dies”, there is a small amount of time in which another player can rush over to him and revive him, allowing him to continue the fight. And if it so happens that the player cannot be revived and ends up dying, they will respawn at the start of the next wave, so long as at least one player survives to finish off the current wave. This means that just because you died, it doesnt mean your out for the remainder of the game. Unfortunately, this simple and fun revival mode did not make it to AVP, meaning that you will likely spend some time floating above your friends, secretly hoping they all die soon so that you will be able to start a new game so you can play again. This was a really bad move by the developers, and it really kills the best online mode that AVP has.
So if I said that the survival mode was the best, yet I bashed on it pretty hard, how do the competitive modes pan out? Not very good at all. The basic competitive mode is your typical Deathmatch. Up to twelve players can compete to become the guy with the most kills. Unfortunately, it wasnt very fun. The demo deathmatch, while hard to get into, was fun since everyone was just learning the controls and whatnot. However, now that the game is out and people have been playing for a few weeks, players have quickly learned to spam the melee blocking, meaning that there are plenty of cheap deaths to go around. Inexperienced players will easily fall to the one-hit cheapness of a stealthy Alien player, and who ever heard of a Marine pistol-whipping an Alien to death?! The melee combat is extremely lame and unrealistic, and unfortunately it follows over to the online play, making it a lot less fun.
There are some other modes, including an infestation mode where eight players try to survive to see who the last Marine standing is. The game starts with seven Marine and one Alien players. Each time the Alien makes a kill, that player respawns as an Alien. The basic gist of the mode is to be the last Marine standing when the remaining seven players are Aliens. Unfortunately, these online modes, while having potential, were executed poorly, making an extremely frustrating experience that is not a whole lot of fun, and does nothing to add to the replayability of AVP.
The Aliens and Predator franchise have been hit or miss. By themselves, they are pretty solid (with the exception of Alien: Resurrection.) When combined, like the AVP films, they are usually failures, or if nothing more just a cheesy action-fest with no story. Sega took the AVP franchise and attempted to make an awesome game, boasting three single-player campaigns and a variety of online modes. However, the lack of story or depth in the campaigns, the inclusion of a melee combat system for all species, and the lack of revival in a co-op mode made the game barely playable. Fans of either series should get a guilty pleasure breezing through the campaigns, especially the Aliens one. FPS fans might enjoy the Marines campaign, and be intrigued by the differentiated competitive combat.
But I cant stress this enough…fan or no fan, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!!! I received it on Thursday, and will be returning it by Monday. The campaigns are over to quickly and the online modes are only frustrating. I guarantee that you will not want to spend any more time with the game than you have to. That being said, I do recommend the game for a couple of days rental for fans of the franchise.
