Aliens vs. Predator Review

***Greenskull*** · April 25th, 2010

For so long now gamers have been begging for an Aliens vs. Predator game that’s as good as the old PC games used to be. So does this new version hold up?

In the single-player portion of AvP, you can choose between three different campaigns: Alien, Predator, and Marine. Each plays quite differently, so there’s something for everyone. In the Alien campaign, you sneak around, performing stealth kills and harvesting innocents. It plays a lot like a weird mixture of Splinter Cell, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and...well...Aliens. You’ll often find yourself waiting on a ceiling for a single Marine to isolate himself so you can take him out unnoticed. By holding the Left Trigger, you can transition between surfaces to move along walls and ceilings. Due to the fast pace and the quick reorientations, playing as an Alien often gets VERY disorienting. Every now and then you’ll need to take a second to figure out where you are.

The Predator plays more like an FPS. You stand upright and kick some ass. Right Trigger fires a beam that obliterates any foe as long as you have enough energy to do it. You can replenish energy by absorbing it through human terminals and you can replenish health with health crystals that you find around the environment. Doing big jumps and using invisibility to sneak up behind enemies feels pretty great.

The Marine campaign plays like a typical FPS horror game. There are a lot of areas that will make you jump, and you feel truly vulnerable when facing off against an Alien. The dark lighting of hallways and motion sensor make it almost like a game of hide and seek. The motion sensor constantly beeps while you are playing, and that can get annoying fast. Getting used to that is one of the hardest parts of playing a Marine.

In all Campaigns, if you don’t know what you’re doing you will probably die pretty fast. So get used to the controls and gameplay before ramping up the difficulty. The most satisfying part of Aliens vs. Predator? The kills. There are some pretty gruesome kills you make when you press X behind an enemy, and you get to enjoy it all in first person. Watching the predator rips out the spine of a human or the alien jab its tail through someone’s head is pretty satisfying. The game is worth a play literally for those kills.

Multiplayer can be summed up in one clever statement: Rock, paper, dynamite. The rock being Aliens, the paper being Marines, and the dynamite being Predators. A skilled predator can easily dominate any opponent that tries to mess with him. With the almost unfair cannon, a 3 second charge is all a Predator needs to wipe out another player. Aliens are a blast to play with in Multiplayer. When you are sneaking around over the unsuspecting heads of some Marines down below and you look over to see three of your buddies doing the same, you feel a great sense of connection between your teammates. You truly feel like you are an Alien and those are your brothers. Now of course there are a lot of people who just run off and do their own thing, but it isn’t very easy to take down a suspicious Predator without some help. One thing still gets me every time though: Why is there no actual Aliens vs Predator mode?

Overall, Aliens vs. Predator is a fun game and is worth checking out, but when compared with the success of the older games in the series, it just doesn’t hold up.

Final Score:

7/10