This poor game was doomed before it even printed to disc. Doomed like a fat kid that walks on the bus for the first day of school with a Pop Tart in each hand (different flavors) and maple syrup slathered across his face. That little fucker is screwed, man. Game over.

I am an avid fan of the Alien and Predator franchises, and before that the only game that could manage to pull me away from consoles was Aliens vs. Predator 2 for the PC. Sure I dabbled in Master of Orion 2 and MechWarrior 2, but only because my brother had them on his machine. I actually went and upgraded my old man’s PC to be able to run Aliens vs. Predator 2. It was also my first foray into competitive multiplayer, though as usual I abandoned it for repeat playthroughs of the campaign. Rebellion had quite a legacy to live up to.

Unfortunately, they didn’t. Which is no surprise, as Monolith, creators of the F.E.A.R. and No One Lives Forever franchises, were the developers of the second and superior game. Rebellion merely made the first one, a good game but not as incredible as the predecessor. In fact, Rebellion has never really been a studio noted for their amazing and memorable titles. They have more Rogue Warriors on their resume than they do Aliens vs. Predators.

Well, figuratively speaking, considering they’ve made a ton of AvP variants.

So yes, Aliens vs. Predator has failed to make me climax in the same way you failed to please your prom date back in Junior year of high school. Yes, you, who had to Google “where is the rhymes-with-licorice” the morning after. Rebellion fails with the very same ineptitude with one exception. A third of the game’s single player campaign is actually worthwhile. The remaining two, however, would have been better if they just re-skinned the previous game.

I used to point to the games as an example of how Hollywood needs to handle an Alien vs. Predator movie, but this game just screwed the whole story up somehow. I’m still not completely sure of what happened, but one big gaping black hole in logic just persisted in ruining my experience. Because Paul Anderson decided he wanted both the Aliens and Predators tied to all that Chariot of the Gods hoo-haa we have Pyramids. There is a pyramid in the game just as there was in the frozen arctic of Earth. Yet if you recall, the film used human sacrifices in order to create the Aliens. This would explain why so much of the architecture resembles the Alien we have come to know and love.

Yet we’ve also learned that this shape of the Alien is a result of what it bursts out of. When emerging from, say, a dog/bull (depends on whether you watch the director’s cut of Alien 3 or not), the creature is a bit bigger and runs upon four legs. When it bursts from a Predator it sports dreadlocks and them spikey mouth thingies.

So why, in this outer space Not-Earth planet where the Pyramid is located and humans do not live, is the architecture covered with the generic human alien?

I know it’s a small detail, but it drove me nuts. The architecture in the film resembled the human based creature because they were on Earth and used humans to create more of the Aliens. Yet this planet has no humans. Did the Predators transport a bunch from Earth to this remote location? Why not just seed a human colony on the planet instead? After all, it would have been a lot cheaper. Less costly in fuel and all that. Yet instead they just miraculously have a pyramid that somehow is modeled after the human based Aliens despite a severe lack of humans.

It is this sort of oversight that seems to cover the entire game. Small things that no one ever really thought about, or possibly doing better. It was a project half-assed. Maybe part of it is for budgetary reasons as each campaign literally takes place on the same stages as the others. Sure there are multiple differences to each map to make up for the different racial abilities, but it instead feels like they didn’t have enough ideas and so just reworked the same six stages into three different campaigns. I’m still not quite sure when and how they all overlap, either, a problem I never had in the previous game.

Yet to truly dig into this experience I must break it down campaign by campaign. See, at the very least Rebellion made sure the different species all played differently, and at the end of the day that is what makes the real difference. Some campaigns were just managed better than others.

Marine

The entire beginning of the Marine campaign left a sour taste in my mouth. On one hand it just feels completely illogical for a Predator ship to take out a human vessel out of nowhere. Space combat is warfare, not hunting. There are no trophies and the simple fact is the humans never stood a chance. That’s the whole thing about hunting. Yes, you technically have the edge, but there is no accounting for a resourceful man turning around and getting the best of you. There is still a risk factor. Of course, there are ways I guess it can tie in logically, but I’ll get to that later.

What really ticked me off was how much you missed in the beginning. In AvP2 the Marines arrived to an abandoned colony, exploring it in a very creepy setting. They took the elements from Aliens and threw in a little bit of Predator to create a slow-paced yet creepy vibe. None of it was handled in cut-scene except the exposition to explain why you’re on the colony in the first place. It is all handled using gameplay to tell the story.

Yet in the new game your character is knocked silly during a harsh landing and going in and out of consciousness. As a result the Marines keep carrying you into what is clearly a hot zone (which makes little enough sense on its own), where you get to hear Aliens taking your team out. Then you wake up in a room with no sign of conflict whatsoever. No blood, no bullet holes, no corpses of either race, nothing. How your team was killed and you weren’t carried back to the Hive I don’t know, either. It just seems like the developers tried to rush the player into isolation rather than deliver an effective narrative.

I wish this was the worst of it, but every aspect of story-telling in the Marine campaign seems to fail. Halfway through you defeat the Colony’s Queen, who doesn’t even put up a fight herself. She just sticks to her cocoon and lets her soldiers do the work while you light her on fire. What should have been the final boss was just some lousy fight in the middle of the campaign. Instead they decide the ultimate climax should be you versus a shotgun toting Android. That’s it. The big challenge is finding a place to take good enough cover so you can kill him in five or six seconds before he gets close enough to plaster you with pellets. The penultimate fight for the Marine is against a robot, a God damn robot, instead of a fucking Alien or Predator!

So the game proper fails at delivering a compelling narrative, but how about the audio logs? Do they at least give some sense of mystery and personality to the colony? Not really. It seems the guys at Rebellion completely missed what made their use in Bioshock so important. The audio logs are supposed to not only give a sense of the timeline of events, but also how the characters changed to their situation. At the start of Bioshock Andrew Ryan is a proud man, but towards the end he and his vision are threatened and it turns him into a power hungry maniac. Dr. Steinman becomes so bored making people look physically perfect that he begins to become fascinated with asymmetry, cutting into any and all people like Jason Vorhees. In Aliens vs. Predator our friend Weyland starts as an asshole and ends as an asshole. There is no real timeline forged, no sense of events, no idea how they found the colony, where they discovered the Aliens, how they made them, and no real concept of character to any audio log you find. People are either complaining that life on the colony sucks, scared and getting cut off halfway through the recording as something kills them or chattering on about how great a jerk they are.

That’s not to say the Marine campaign is all bad. Having to make out the Aliens against the background is a lot more tough thanks to new graphics and lighting technology, and being swarmed by them certainly provides a series of tense and action packed set pieces. There was thought given into the A.I. as well, which can be easily missed when you are escorting an ally impregnated with an Alien embryo and the creatures themselves completely skip past her and beeline for you. Such a nod towards Alien 3 shows that the developers at least put some thought into this game.

Alien

Another campaign that held my ire before it even made it out of the gate. One of the best parts of Aliens vs. Predator 2 was starting out as a Facehugger, having to sneak through the environment in order to find someone to latch onto. It was such an interesting experience that it even made for a great aspect of multiplayer.

Yet here it is completely removed from the single player campaign. Instead we cut right to playing as the Alien, which ironically enough feels more complicated than before. Here I thought games were simplified for console, yet the PC version is much more straight forward. The way the controls are described wall-walking is a bit of a pain. In order to move from one surface to the next you have to hold the left trigger. This is technically no different than holding the crouch button in the previous game, but here you are taught to leap onto different surfaces if you want to wall-walk. The mechanic is taught in a completely different manner when the player should merely be told to hold down the trigger to travel across the different surfaces.

Due to the complex geometry of the environments it’s easy to get stuck on certain objects and even find certain surfaces impossible to climb. At the end of the day the best choice is to just stick to the ceiling and drop down behind guys when you get the opportunity.

Simultaneously the melee combat is more complex than it really ought to be. Maybe it’s in order to keep the Alien on equal footing with the Predator in multiplayer, but there is a whole slew of blocks, light attacks and hard attacks that make combat unnecessarily complex. All that was needed before was a stun attack and a basic attack which also worked as a stealth kill. After a few hours of play the melee is easy enough to pick up on, but having to hold two buttons on this situation, press this button on this situation, and now you can press this button to do some real damage. This is nothing to say of stealth kills being tied to a completely different button than any of the melee strikes. What was once two buttons is now taken up by three and a combination of two that acts as a fourth.

Speaking of, all these stealth kills and executions end up being way too theatrical and take so much time as to leave you wide open. All you may want to do is walk up and bite into their head, but instead you’re forced to watch as the Alien slowly grabs a guy, shoves his tail into the guy’s back and up out of their mouth (yes, that is seriously one of the finishing moves) and then to finally let go. Meanwhile any Marine that happens to step around the corner suddenly gets a good look at you and forces you into escaping fire as quick as possible. Maybe I just don’t get an erection for gore like some people, but I’d rather these different deaths be quick and silent so I could go from one to the next.

Even so, it’s not a bad campaign experience. It’s about on par with the marine campaign as a whole, only has the benefit of being unique compared to other games in the first person genre. You don’t get any projectile attacks, having to rely instead on stealth. The Alien also has the more interesting puzzles making use of the entire environment in order to change the pace between fights. Plus, the Alien gets a very appropriate final conflict having to bust up three Predators with his buddies. Much more satisfying than, say, an android with a shotgun.

Predator

The only real complaint I have here ties into why the Predators would fire upon a human space vessel at the start of the Marine campaign. It all seems out of character. It technically makes sense when you consider the Predators are pissed that humans have entered this “sacred ground” and are thus trying to “make them pay for their sacrilege”, but even then it just doesn’t make much overall sense. It’s not like the humans actually screwed anything up. Wouldn’t their presence be more of a delight to these hunters? I’d think these Predators, who pride themselves on hunting the most dangerous game of the universe, would see these humans as being a delightful amusement. Yeah, they stepped in on “sacred ground”, but it seems more likely to me that a Predator would laugh at the humans being so over their head, like a youth that has stumbled upon his father’s Plasma Caster for the first time. Instead of just fighting Aliens they get to fight Aliens and humans now! It’s like Christmas for ugly mother fuckers.

Yet aside from that, the only real flaws to the Predator campaign are small and not quite as significant. Hopping between the different heights makes you properly mobile, landing in water deactivates your cloaking and you can even draw foes away using modified voice like in the films. The visual effects from the different vision modes are incredibly well done and make hunting your prey a much more delightful experience.

The only real flaws come from the equipment. That’s not to say the weapons are necessarily bad. On the contrary, what they have is good. The real issue comes in how you can only unlock the abilities by slowly progressing through the campaign, only reaching maximum potential towards the end. In addition, the variety of tools feels a bit stale. Using more of the weaponry from the second film would have helped make the experience more interesting, and tools like the net would have certainly helped when being overwhelmed by Aliens. It would also be nice if cloaking didn’t deactivate any time you tried to do something, such as press a button or shove your wrist blades through someone’s spinal column.

In the end, however, the Predator campaign is the real reason to play the new Aliens vs. Predator. It honestly feels as if they should have abandoned the other two campaigns and just built an entire game around the most bad ass hunter in the galaxy. Who knows, though? With Sega owning the publishing rights to the franchises maybe we’ll get one soon (that is, one that is better than Concrete Jungle).

Overall

The new Aliens vs. Predator isn’t a bad game by any stretch. However, it’s hardly a great game, which is what I had come to expect after Aliens vs. Predator 2 finally brought me into full PC gaming mode. Perhaps after F.3.A.R. Monolith would like another stab at the franchise, or maybe another studio can give the franchise a shot. As said, Sega holds the publishing rights so they can get any studio they want.

For now, however, I can only recommend this game on the cheap. It’s a fun experience and for the most part well designed, but honestly I say just grab the second game off of Steam or something and play that instead. That is, unless you want a really good but really short Predator game, in which case wait until it’s about $10.

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