Jason Trent, Associate Writer

Aliens vs Predator Review

February 23, 2010

Licensed games have a bad reputation to overcome. Generally speaking, they're little more than sad attempts to milk more money out of consumers: fans of a certain movie, comic book, or other IP. Over the past year, we've seen a handful of licensed games that have been surprisingly good. First, we were given X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It's wasn't an amazing title by any means, but it showed that licensed games could still compete with original ideas. Then there was Batman: Arkham Asylum that was one of my favorite games of 2009. Not only did this game do its own source material justice, it proved that a licensed game could leap over its competition. You could have taken Batman out of the story completely, and the gameplay would still stand on its own merits. You could have your e-cake and eat it too. It seemed like we were on a roll, so I was hoping for a similar experience with Aliens vs Predator. What I thought looked to be a promising game turned out to have more problems than positives.

The gameplay is sloppy, and at times, it's downright silly. One example that comes to mind is at a point in the game where, as an alien, you're tasked with getting over an electrical fence. The fence is pretty high up, and handily, a lone branch hangs from a tree to the other side of the obstacle. I don't know about you, but if I were a xenomorph with the ability to climb on any surface, I'd probably climb on that branch, crawl over the fence, then jump off to the other side. If you try to climb the tree and onto the branch, you'll hit an invisible wall, so rather than taking the sensible path, you instead have to find a hole in a vent to travel through in order to continue through the level. It's almost like the level designers tried to make things unintuitive to get some sort of sick pleasure from my frustrations. Do you ever have conversations with people who can't be reasoned with? It's kind of like that. No matter what you do or try, the game has to be obtuse about things. Due to this, the campaign fails on a fundamental level.

For the first two campaigns, you're given few tasks that are interesting. You'll spend most of your time traveling from point A to point B, and sometimes things are mixed up with having to flip a switch, or carry a power source from one place to the other. Thankfully, the game takes a pleasant turn for the best during its final campaign while you play as the Predator. The Predator is a hybrid class that falls somewhere between the space marine and aliens as far as functionality is concerned. You're a bit melee, a lot stealth, and even have a few ranged attacks that prove to be useful. Halfway through this campaign, you'll pretty much be unstoppable, and though it's all a bit overpowered, it's fun, and that's something the other two classes are not.

The AI is just plain bad. Rarely during the campaign will you see your enemies use their abilities properly. Aliens, who should be climbing on pretty much any surface other than the floor right in front of you, routinely drop right into your line of fire. A foe who should be smart and cunning has become the dumbest and clumsiest race in the game. Humans on the other hand don't fare much better. They're each equipped with sonar that can tell them when their enemy approaches, but they don't use it. They're never proactive about trying to kill you. Their friends will mysteriously wind up without a head and they don't seem upset or alarmed about it. It's only when your opponents are actual people do each race's strengths seem to become apparent, and that's where multiplayer comes in.

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